The modern cases are a treat, and there’s an added bonus of the 14th-century murder.
Antiques dealer Kate Hamilton, an American living in a British town called Long Barston, is involved in yet another case of historical murder.
Actually, Kate, who’s married to DCI Tom Mallory, has two, possibly three murders to solve: two in the present, the other from the 14th century. An archeological dig has discovered a woman so well-preserved that the searchers can tell that her eyes were blue. Kate and her colleague, Ivor Tweedy, have been asked to examine the grave goods, including a magnificent pearl, which are being stored at an estate called Ravenswyck Court, on whose grounds they were found. They’re invited to dinner at Finchley Hall, home of Kate’s friend Lady Barbara Finchley-fforde, to meet the archeologists, from the University of East Anglia. Their leader, Dr. Simon Sinclair, is a brilliant backstabber willing to do anything to advance himself. The rest of the team includes Barbara’s adopted niece, Dr. Celia Whybrew; Dr. Niall Nevin; and two Ph.D. candidates, Mark Lambe and Tamzin Oliver. The owner of Ravenswyck Court is wealthy entrepreneur Alex Belcourt, whose wife, Carrie Holgate, disappeared years ago. He hires Kate to discover the truth about Egemere Woman in honor of his beloved wife. The site is picketed by people opposed to disturbing the dead—even though the dig had already been suspended—and everyone is shocked to discover Sinclair lying dead in one of the trenches, apparently murdered. Tom is well aware of his wife’s talents when it comes to murder investigations, but his ambitious new DI, Amy Cartwright, is looking for credit herself. As the police check the alibis of the obvious suspects, Mark Lambe finally gets his wish to investigate a nearby plague pit, where the pregnant corpse of Carrie Holgate is found. With Tom busy on another case, Kate has her hands full.
The modern cases are a treat, and there’s an added bonus of the 14th-century murder.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798892422093
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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
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