Quirky characters, small-town charm, and links to contemporary issues and historical events enliven this series debut.
A cozy mystery series kicks off with heaping helpings of small-town charm.
The first installment of McQ’s series opens with a backstory that quickly establishes its hero’s flamboyance, fortitude, and faith. Born “on the back side of a bayou in the middle of a thunderstorm” and winning the local “Miss Crawdad Pageant” three years running in her youth, Sashé Boudreaux finds purpose providing “hushpuppies, makeovers, and justice” to her neighbors in Cypress Grove, Louisiana, her tiny backwater of a hometown. When Harold Landry, one of the shut-ins she delivers home-cooked meals to, goes missing one Tuesday morning, Sashé’s “good instincts” kick into gear: “Nobody misses my Tuesday tapioca. Nuh-uh. Not on purpose.” Friendly chats with friends in the community—including Arleen, a retired cop who drives the town shuttle; Delphine, who runs the recycling center; and Elaine at the post office—reveal that no one has seen Landry since Thursday night bingo. Rumor has it that he may have been mixed up in clandestine activities with a couple of other local oddballs: a reclusive retired archaeologist and a traumatized Vietnam vet. Meanwhile, Bobbie Rae, who sells homemade goat-milk soaps and reads people’s auras at the farmers market, has been experiencing weird, ominous dreams, and her bad-boy boyfriend, Trey (whose older brother is doing time in nearby Angola prison), is acting strange. A hidden network of underground tunnels once used by Civil War–era bandits and a hunky new sheriff add intrigue and excitement to the mystery. McQ pours on the Southern charm extra thick, peppering the dialogue with “y’all,” “Lordy!,” “criminy,” and homespun phrases like “hotter’n Hades.” The characters wash down generous helpings of delicious, down-home food with copious quantities of sweet tea (with extra sugar). But what at first seems like over-the-top cornpone is rescued by a plot that ties modern-day evils to historical atrocities and a cast of endearing, plucky characters who rise above stereotypes and genuinely look out for each other. Brief author’s notes at the end discuss the novel’s historical context.
Quirky characters, small-town charm, and links to contemporary issues and historical events enliven this series debut.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9798999406736
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Sand Dollar Press, Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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