Riggs’ pleasantly old-fashioned sleuth (Bloodroot, 2016, etc.) is still clever enough to come up with a surprising culprit...
It takes a sleuth with years of experience and loads of local connections to solve the murder of a very unpopular woman.
Poet and amateur sleuth Victoria Trumbull, who’s spent her entire 92 years on Martha’s Vineyard, has rented a room to Zack Zeller, a nice but rather dim young man. While they’re taking a nature walk together, she points out the rare black trumpets of death mushrooms, which, despite their name, are not poisonous. Zack is just one of many men and women who’ve been captivated by wealthy, attractive Samantha Eberhardt, whose vindictive father throws more money than love in her direction. When Zack tries to break up with her, she claims to be pregnant, and Zack plots to feed her some death trumpets, which he hopes will cause a miscarriage. No fool, Samantha tells her father that she thinks Zack is trying to poison her. He invites Zack to a dinner where the mushrooms are served, though not to Zack, who runs away. When Samantha’s found murdered, Zack is naturally the prime suspect, but he has more to fear from vengeful Mr. Eberhardt than the police. Victoria’s certain that Zack is innocent, but she already has her hands full with the case of a young local burned to death in a fire deliberately set at a disused old parsonage. As Victoria mines her sources for information, she finds that Samantha has taken many lovers and gotten many local young people hooked on drugs. Clearly, there’s a surfeit of possible killers to winnow before Victoria can solve the crimes.
Riggs’ pleasantly old-fashioned sleuth (Bloodroot, 2016, etc.) is still clever enough to come up with a surprising culprit in another graceful homage to the island both she and her author call home.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12266-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
A good one in the tough school, in which private detective Marlowe is hired to investigate a blackmailing and finds himself bucking a well-run gang, several murders, and the D A's office. Hard-boiled, fast paced, plenty of action, some sensationalism. Not for conservatives.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1938
ISBN: 0394758285
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1938
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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