Consistently more powerful in its exploration of the Red Scare than in its invocation of contemporaneous noir tropes.
Leaving behind the quiet yet murderous settings of Murder at the College Library (2024) and its predecessors, Lehane’s most impassioned and ambitious novel plunges into the anti-communist frenzy of 1950.
Mick Mulligan was fired from his job as a Disney animator when he refused to name names to the FBI. Now that his wife has left him and taken their toddler daughter, he’s hung out his shingle as a private eye. When Duke Rogowski, president of the United Taxi and Limousine Drivers, asks Mick to reopen the case of Harold Williams, a Black communist on death row for shooting his boss, cab company owner Irwin Johnson, Mick’s intrigued by the call. But he has questions of his own. What possible leads can there be that the police haven’t already investigated? Why did Duke wait a year after Williams’ conviction to make this move, only two weeks before his scheduled execution? And how can Mick tack between the wishes of Duke’s two vice presidents, self-identified communist Sol Rosen, who’s eager to see Williams exonerated, and mob boss Vincent Forlini, who’s firmly opposed to troubling the waters? The more deeply involved Mick gets with the richly detailed cast of interested parties—rabid anti-communists, communists and socialist organizers of every stripe, FBI informers, and three beautiful women: Duke’s wife, Cynthia; Johnson’s widow, Eva; and Elena DeMarco, the sister of Williams’ co-worker and friend—the more he realizes that the conflicts that led to Johnson’s murder are a lot more complicated than J. Edgar Hoover evidently assumes.
Consistently more powerful in its exploration of the Red Scare than in its invocation of contemporaneous noir tropes.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297202
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.
Romance novelist Finlay Donovan, who’s never met a line she wouldn’t cross, crosses several new ones in her attempt to prove her nanny/best friend’s innocence of theft.
The good news is that Veronica Ramirez isn’t in jail despite the evidence against her of pocketing the substantial profits from her college sorority Kappa Gamma’s weekly succession of illegal gambling nights. The bad news begins with the fact that she’s under house arrest in the custody of her mother, Norma, who vociferously disapproves of Vero’s unplanned Atlantic City wedding to her boyfriend, Javi. Then there’s the fact that her sorority sisters, headed by former president and recent graduate Mia and current vice president Ava, have closed ranks in giving damning evidence against her. No wonder Vero and Norma have been the recipients of an unrelenting barrage of anonymous and often disgusting threats. Oh, and don’t forget that small-time bookie Theo Sideris, Vero’s alibi witness because they were sharing a bed at the time, has gone AWOL. Searching for him in a frantic attempt to clear Vero’s name ends up implicating virtually every other member of the cast in one crime or another and pretty much guarantees that by the time the charge of theft against Vero has finally been dismissed, she and Finn will have plenty of other brand-new charges to contend with. Fans of Cosimano’s overcaffeinated franchise can only pray that Finn will return safely to the arms of her own improbable lover, police detective Nick Anthony, so that she can concentrate on supplying her agent, Sylvia Barr, with steamy chapters of her new novel.
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781250337597
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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