A smart and fun detective story with a New Jersey accent.
As a former police chief tries to change her life, she’s pulled back into old paths as two dead bodies wash up in her seaside hometown.
It’s the summer of 1976, and in the fifth Mickey Cleary mystery, Mickey has things on her mind beside America’s Bicentennial. As she tries to become a New Jersey state trooper, a misogynistic fellow recruit aims to get her kicked out. As if that wasn’t enough, she and her husband are discovering that his time in Vietnam might have health consequences. Then two bodies wash up on the shore amid sand piled to make them look like snow angels. Meanwhile, a young man named Danny Casolaro works at a bar, and Maryalice Delaney, his friend and co-worker, is missing. His boss shares a rumor that she got married to some random guy and left town, but Danny knows that’s not like her. He’s worried because of a strange patron who came to the bar a few days ago. At the same time, a woman named Jacquie has been kidnapped but escapes into the Pine Barrens. There, she meets Sister Marian, a nun who previously went to Mickey for help. As Mickey is brought in on the case of the two dead bodies, she realizes she has a personal connection to the victims. This furthers her resolve to bring the suspect to justice, but as she delves deeper into the case, she learns an even more dangerous secret. Waters, a physician, gives a vivid picture of the setting, centered on the real-life town of Surf City on Long Beach Island. Mickey’s character shows development as well as maturity for the treacherous situations the plot brings her way. Other characters, such as Danny, Jacquie, and Marian, are shown to have their own personalities and dynamic qualities. This interesting cast of characters helps push the fast-paced plot forward, with surprising turns that enhance the mystery.
A smart and fun detective story with a New Jersey accent.Pub Date: April 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73499-993-8
Page Count: 345
Publisher: ControlPrint Creative
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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