Adultery, blackmail, trick-or-treaters, unseemly ties to organized crime, and New York in the 1990s. What’s not to like?
Headline news: Movie star Merilee Nash wants her ex, sometime novelist Stewart Hoag, back! There are a couple of murders, too.
Halloween 1993 finds Merilee still off shooting The Sun Also Rises and Hoagy holed up in the Central Park West apartment she’s graciously loaned him, writing away furiously. Gary Kates, one of Merilee’s neighbors on the 16th floor, is a corporate raider who’s brought misery to hardworking families across America by buying companies and brutally downsizing their workforces. He’s such a natural candidate for murder that it’s a double shock when Muriel Cantrell, an aging widow who’s nice as peach cobbler, is found with a broken neck on the 15th floor landing of the service stairs. Nobody from first-shift doorman Frank O’Brien to Bullets Durmond, the mobbed-up ex-bouncer who’s driven Muriel around for years in her 1955 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, has an unkind word to say about her. But that’s before detective Lt. Romaine Very and Hoagy, who ruefully and repeatedly describes himself as “the first major new literary voice of the 1980s,” begin digging into her past. Hoagy, euphoric to find Merilee not only suddenly returned from the shoot after her director’s been fired over creative differences, but openly eager to get back together, is especially motivated to help Very uncover the skeletons in the closets of Muriel, her old friend Myrna Waldman in Glen Cove, and pretty much everyone else who’s ever passed through her gloriously upscale building. There are so many suspects, in fact, that the big reveal is more like a little squib.
Adultery, blackmail, trick-or-treaters, unseemly ties to organized crime, and New York in the 1990s. What’s not to like?Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-61316-291-0
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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