It’s great to hear more about the hero’s heady life in the days before he became a has-been.
January 1983 finds celebrity novelist Stewart Hoag happily wedding award-winning actress Merilee Nash. Their planned honeymoon is another story.
On the very day that Hoagy and Merilee tie the knot in a private civil ceremony, Merilee’s cousin Phoebe Singleton, her maid of honor, confides that she’s untied her own by filing for divorce from wealthy, orphaned, mega-philandering heir Junior Singleton. Eager for the newlyweds to buy the swanky Manhattan town house she kept in the split, she invites them over to look around. That’s when they realize her marriage has been ended even more decisively than they thought by whoever stabbed Junior in the eyeball in his dressing room with one of the eight steak knives the couple received as a wedding gift. Even worse, the killer has made off with a second steak knife that seems, and is, destined for another target. Though Det. Lt. Meyer Golden, the NYPD homicide detective in charge of the investigation, laments the “acute shortage of genuinely sleazy people in this case,” there are plenty of suspects who might have wanted Junior to become the last of his line because he cheated on them or got them pregnant or pulled the funding for their research or infected them with HIV in the days before lifesaving therapies. Tentatively accepting a commission from Phoebe’s mother, Pippa Trowbridge, the dragonish editor of SHE magazine, to write a memorial profile of Junior, Hoagy tags along with Golden, dutifully reporting all the latest dirt for readers who missed these revelations the first time—and then yet again in the deeply old-fashioned denouement Hoagy feels obliged to stage before that honeymoon can commence.
It’s great to hear more about the hero’s heady life in the days before he became a has-been.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781613167328
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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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