A satisfying and thought-provoking mystery with an enthralling cast.
In this novel, the murder of his sister sends a geology professor to California’s High Desert on a mission to gain greater understanding of his sibling and ferret out her killer.
Forty-four-year-old L. Walker Clayborne, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of California, San Diego, was preparing to leave on a sabbatical when he received a call from the sheriff in Yucca Valley informing him of his sister Claire’s murder. Now, he is standing in the valley’s hospital morgue staring at Claire’s battered body, remembering how she received that small scar at the top of her lip. He meets police Det. Rick Bolles, and as they talk, he begins to realize how little he really knows about his rebellious sister. Two weeks later, after a funeral held in Phoenix, where the professor, Claire, and their older brother, Edgar, were raised, Walker heads to Joshua Tree, California. Now that the crime tape has been taken down, he enters Claire’s small cottage for the first time. He will soon embark on an investigative, emotional, and metaphysical journey that will challenge his highly focused, carefully organized persona. He has also unknowingly put his own life in danger. That first day he meets one of Claire’s friends, Kirsten Benninger, who shares her suspicions that the murder has something to do with his sister’s involvement with a group protesting “Universal Waste,” an international corporation planning to build the world’s largest landfill in the desert. But this is just one of many possibilities: Claire served as a counselor at Eagle Mountain prison, worked with drug addicts in rehab, and volunteered at a free health clinic that also helped abused women. The police have made scant progress, leaving the heavy lifting to Walker, aided by a devoted and eclectic circle of Claire’s friends.
Isaak’s meticulously detailed prose is engaging from the get-go in this novel published posthumously. The narrative, albeit a bit overpacked, offers something for almost everyone: the geological history of Yucca Valley, implicit social commentary, metaphysical phenomena, fringe group religious zealousness, and, of course, a basic murder mystery. Walker narrates the tale, and readers quickly learn how amusingly controlled he is: “I had to move all my dental items to the right” of the sink. “No matter how you clean an electric razor there are always little whisker fragments, and I tried to make sure they stayed out of my toothbrush.” But most intriguing are Claire’s friends, who warmly welcome Walker into their fold and ultimately help him unlock the secrets and untapped flexibility of his own psyche. There is computer whiz Mandy Cicerone, who has psychic visions, and the mysteriously captivating Melanie, who describes herself as an occultist and practices wicca on the side. Just outside the friendship circle but critical to the story is the eccentric, eminent physicist Ronald Ettenmoor, who is conducting paranormal experiments. This is an intoxicating mix of characters. The book, which delivers an action-filled climax, provides a compelling study of the dynamics of unique interpersonal relationships.
A satisfying and thought-provoking mystery with an enthralling cast.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-1958840085
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Utamatzi Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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