Poor Agatha Christie is given nothing to do here but collect material to rehash in one of her own most celebrated novels.
Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan’s trial move from Devon to test the waters of London is marked by a series of theatrical murders they ask their housekeeper to solve.
Summoned to the Adelphi Theater by her distraught friend and employer, Phyllida Bright joins Agatha and Max in mourning the death of Archibald Allston, whom producing couple Hugh and Melissa Satterwait had been eyeing as the possible lead for Wasp’s Nest, a play based on one of Agatha’s stories. Examining the scene and the body a lot more closely than the police would have approved of, had anyone thought to call them, Phyllida concludes that Archie died of natural causes. The same can’t be said for Trent Orkney, the Benvolio clubbed to death at the Belmont Theater the next day. Drama critic Abernathy Vane’s alliterative headline—“Benvolio Bashed on Balcony at the Belmont! And Alston Asleep in Armchair at the Adelphi”—playfully suggests that the two deaths are connected, a suspicion that’s less playfully confirmed when Claudia Carmichael, the star of Peter Pan, is catapulted from her rope harness to her death at the Clapham. Even as she does her best to protect the most likely next target—Daphne Dayberry, who plays Lucy in the Dunsary Theater’s production of Dracula—Phyllida, encouraged to her surprise by Scotland Yard inspector George Wellbourne, works tirelessly to figure out the motive behind the rigorous but random-seeming pattern. The result is her most ingeniously plotted case, though also her least original.
Poor Agatha Christie is given nothing to do here but collect material to rehash in one of her own most celebrated novels.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781496742599
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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