An entertaining, quick beach read with memorable mismatched sleuths.
Cochran’s cozy mystery revisits a 20-year-old case concerning the mysterious disappearance of three men who lived in an old mansion.
In the northeastern town of Stillwell sits a mansion built in the late 19th century and purchased by health-products guru Asa Marlowe in the 1940s. After Asa’s death, his impressive fortune, including the mansion, was inherited by his son, Asa Marlowe II, commonly called Junior. In time, Junior also had a son, Asa Marlowe III, called Three. Junior and Three lived in the mansion with their wives, Eunice and Carmela. Then there was Roscoe Savini and his wife, Felicia; town gossip holds that Roscoe was Junior’s illegitimate son, born around the same time as Three. Two decades ago, all three men disappeared. In the present, Eunice, Carmela, and Felicia live in the mansion. Retired Stillwell PD detective Harvey Hawkshaw is watching television when he sees a news report on the 20th anniversary of the disappearance—it had been Harvey’s case, the one that still haunts him (“‘Same as it was 20 years ago, Fluffy,’” he says to his cat. “‘I thought those biddies did it, but I couldn’t crack that case. Cold then and cold now’”). A $150,000 reward is offered for solving the mystery. Two young boys digging around on the Marlow property discover a long-buried body. Could this be one of the missing men? It’s time for Harvey to put his detective’s cap back on. Hanging out at his go-to diner, Harvey runs into a fast-talking jokester who goes by the name Flywheel. Harvey takes Flywheel on as his investigative trainee—Cochran has created the genre’s newest delightful odd-couple detective duo. This is a romp of an investigative procedural, low on action and tension, that mixes a bit of slapstick comedy with a heavy dose of jovial, sometimes silly, sometimes clever, repartee. With a cadre of quirky supporting characters and a plethora of decadeslong secrets waiting to be exposed, the narrative amuses and intrigues. There are enough twists to keep readers scratching their heads, and Harvey and Flywheel develop into enjoyable, fully fledged characters that appear likely to helm a sequel.
An entertaining, quick beach read with memorable mismatched sleuths.Pub Date: March 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798987764497
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Book Writer Corner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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