The 1920s ambience enriches one of the best entries in Harrison’s franchise.
A nun solves a mysterious death, but not to her satisfaction.
The Reverend Mother has gone to the Queen’s Old Castle department store in Cork to pick up flood-damaged merchandise for her poor students. Despite his miserly reputation, Joseph Fitzwilliam, the store's owner, has offered the Reverend Mother anything she needs for no charge. Reverend Mother is being helped by Brian Maloney, a shop apprentice who was once a pupil at her convent school, when Joseph topples over the railing outside his second-floor office and plunges to his death. Agnes Fitzwilliam, Joseph’s wife, accuses Brian of murder. Luckily, Reverend Mother’s dear friend police surgeon Dr. Scher happens to be there and quiets the hysterical woman. The investigating officer, Inspector Patrick Cashman, is another former student with whom Reverend Mother has worked on several other murder investigations (Death of a Novice, 2018, etc.). Evidently one of the gas canisters brought back from the war by Maj. James Fitzwilliam, the shop owner's son, which was being used to fumigate the damaged goods after the flood, has been sent up to Joseph’s small, windowless office by means of the change carriers that run on wires from each department, and the gas overcame him, causing his plunge to the floor—a chancy but ultimately effective means of murder. In addition to his wife, Joseph’s daughters, Monica and Kitty, work at the store, and his younger son, Robert, is the floor manager. They all come under suspicion when the police learn that he’d just changed his will,leaving almost everything to James (who wasn’t in the store at the time), a pittance to his daughters and wife, and nothing to Robert. Reverend Mother uses her extensive Cork connections to gather information on the family and the browbeaten workers, any of whom may have had a motive. After much thought the Reverend Mother comes to a shocking conclusion—but can she get the evidence to prove her theory?
The 1920s ambience enriches one of the best entries in Harrison’s franchise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8830-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
