A sweet and often amusing animal-centered whodunit.
A murder disrupts the peaceful mountain town, and an irrepressible Norwegian Forest cat, along with a posse of dogs and a potbellied pig, is determined to find the culprit in this mystery.
Schneider’s clever tale opens with feline Bijou Bonanno discovering a lifeless body lying by the river. The usually feisty cat is stunned, as she immediately recognizes the face of the deceased; readers, however, don’t learn the victim’s identity until well into the novel. After this initial discovery, the story jumps back two months, recounting events leading up to the dastardly deed. Bijou, who takes her “Viking” heritage quite seriously, is an entertaining narrator, and within a few pages she’ll have readers chuckling; as a result, they’ll be willing to toss disbelief to the wind when they find out that she’s the manager of the town of Grey Birch’s Fox Burrow Pet Inn, assisted by her tiny Pomeranian partner, Skunk. (Both animals belong to Spencer Bonanno, the inn’s winsome human owner.) One day in early spring, a new guest, Eddy Line, enters the inn with his two pets—Hamlet, a baby potbellied pig, and Fennec, a frightened rescue pit bull puppy. Eddie’s just purchased the town’s old firehouse, where he plans to open the Witching Flour bakery; renovation of the building’s upstairs apartment isn’t yet complete, so he and his animals will be staying at the inn. Then somebody cuts the gas line to the firehouse, leaving a threatening note behind. There is a genuine mystery at the heart of the novel, and a disturbing animal-cruelty issue rears its head at one point, but for the most part, this is a jovial fantasy jaunt. The four-legged protagonists, including a few additional secondary players from the forest, are smart characters and have articulate conversations, and Bijou, the fearless, ever imaginative leader of the pack, is snarky but lovable and kind. Schneider is generally a skillful wordsmith, although her persistent use of the first-person subjective pronoun (“Tahereh walked over and gave Spencer and I a one-armed hug”) is surprising and disappointing.
A sweet and often amusing animal-centered whodunit.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 264
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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