Foodies and fans of rural Italy will like this better than mystery buffs.
A reunion of old friends is marred by murder.
Translator Rick Montoya has just finished up an assignment in Palermo when he gets a call from his old fraternity brother Zeke Campbell. Zeke, who’s leading a tour of New Mexicans around Italy, hopes to reconnect with Rick in Rome. Since it will take Rick, son of a New Mexican father and a Roman mother, at least a day to get back to his adopted hometown, they agree to meet in Assisi, the tour’s next stop. Rick’s uncle, police commissario Piero Fontana, suggests that instead of Assisi, Rick might stay with his great-aunt Filomena in nearby Perugia to thank her for lending him her gracious apartment in Rome. Rick isn’t thrilled with the prospect of combining his time reliving his bright college years in Zeke’s company with a visit to an elderly widow, but he agrees. To his surprise and delight, Filomena turns out to be a lively, young-looking senior who dresses elegantly and loves fine food and wine. Unfortunately, the visit is cut short when Rick gets an urgent call from Zeke: Their tour guide has disappeared, and Zeke needs Rick to fill in. While staying at the hotel the tour has booked in Perugia, Rick tries to track down the slippery Ettore Biraldo, the tour guide, and when Biraldo meets his inevitable bad end, Rick helps the police track his killer. Meanwhile, Rick’s girlfriend, art investigator Betta Innocenti, is in Pisa on the trail of a pastel original that disappeared from a side chapel of Saint Ursula church. The only connection between Rick’s case and Betta’s is that both are solved mainly by chance.
Foodies and fans of rural Italy will like this better than mystery buffs.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271019
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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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