A whodunit with a promising premise and likable characters.
In Dziomba’s cozy mystery series starter, an animal shelter worker looks into the sudden and mysterious death of a shelter volunteer with whom she was romantically involved.
Lily Dreyfus has two rescue pups, Boone and Crockett, at home, and she loves working at Bassettville, New Jersey’s Forever Friends Animal Shelter. She’s a bit socially awkward and more comfortable chatting with the shelter dogs and cats than she is with many of the humans in her life. When she receives a request from the state police to take in Burrow, a beautiful German shepherd, she’s stunned; she arranged the adoption of Burrow by ex-Marine Pete Russo, who volunteered at the shelter and whom she’d just started dating. Now, police have found Pete dead, and the cause of his demise is initially a mystery. Lily arranges for Mickey Sterling, her friend and fellow dog owner, to take Burrow until the police can release him for adoption. Several days later, while Lily and Mickey are walking the four dogs in the park, Burrow leads them to the dead body of a young woman. Is there a connection between the two deaths? In a bit of imaginative whimsy, Dziomba has Mickey’s dog, Nero, narrate several chapters, and the gentle giant’s cheerful tone is a welcome change from the staccato voice of the narrator, who relates the bulk of the tale. Although Dziomba provides enjoyably snarky dialogue between Lily and other characters, her prose frequently has the cadence of stage direction (“The boys [Lily’s dogs] saunter to the living room for naps. Lily completes the Saturday chores”). Still, the author’s experience as a rescue volunteer gives an air of authenticity to her descriptions of shelter work and the sensitive attention given to animals in a well-run no-kill facility. And, of course, readers will find the pups entertaining.
A whodunit with a promising premise and likable characters.Pub Date: March 4, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9850655-0-3
Page Count: 259
Publisher: Bowser
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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