A fresh and thought-provoking entry in the ecological murder mystery genre.
A detective investigates an ornithologist’s curious death in Southern California in O’Neal’s mystery novel.
Accomplished birder Brandt Holme is killed by a falling rock in his front yard, which sits in the shadow of the fire-scarred Halconido Mountain in the backcountry of San Diego. The sheriff assigned to the case, Will Aguayo, is a member of the local Luiseño tribe. Recently made detective, he is also quietly falling apart, sleeping in an abandoned forest shelter for months without telling anyone why. Aguayo and his team work through an expanding list of leads in a town where many people have reasons to resent Holme. There’s a shut-in neighbor cataloguing his every move. The dead man’s widow, Faye Holme, is taciturn; their daughter was being written out of the family’s will, and there’s financial drama with the son. The local Episcopal priest turns out to be Holme’s first lover, and her husband was carefully watching their recent interactions. The small-town intrigue and red herrings pile up as a rezoning scheme dressed up as a bird sanctuary plays out in the background, raising bigger questions about land ownership and historical memory. In the course of his investigation, Aguayo develops a relationship with a reclusive painter and has an overdue reconciliation with his reservation roots. O’Neal feathers this busy nest of a novel with intriguing facts and inspiration drawn from California environmental politics, tribal history, and ornithology (“Birds are a metaphor for the soul”). Aguayo’s fear that a truthful answer to the murder mystery will be dismissed as Indigenous superstition is a compelling idea that pays off in the final confrontation (when the solution arrives, the reveal is genuinely surprising). Some of the emotional beats are broad—the lone tear rolling down one character’s cheek in the final pages skirts cheesiness. But the mystery is well plotted, and the path to solving it strange and melancholy.
A fresh and thought-provoking entry in the ecological murder mystery genre.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9798317835033
Page Count: 356
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
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