Another enjoyable beach read from an author who knows her turf.
Murder comes to upstate New York’s peaceful Chautauqua Institution in Pines’ mystery novel.
Mimi Goldman, Chautauquan Dailyreporter and celebrated local amateur sleuth, helps the Chautauqua classic book club host, Harriet Diner, clean up after a lively meeting. At Harriet’s request, Mimi goes upstairs to speak with the young, beautiful Emmy Diner, the recently widowed wife of Harriet’s elder son, Roger. Much to her horror, Mimi discovers Emmy lying on her bed—dead. Mimi notices a small spot of blood on Emmy’s arm, raising the possibility of murder: It’s time for the author’s dynamic duo—60-something Mimi and her 90-year-old sidekick, Sylvia Pritchard—to don their detective caps. Before her death, Emmy hosted a popular podcast, Murders in Our Backyard, in which she hunted down clues to cold cases, with special focus on the 1996 disappearance of Jenny Esposito, a young college student who went missing after a dorm party. Is the guilty party trying to sabotage Emmy’s Esposito investigation? Or is there another secret someone is protecting? As it turns out, almost everybody involved is hiding something, and there are plenty of potential suspects for readers to ponder. This is Pines’ 10th volume in her Chautauqua Mystery series, and she expertly sets the contrast between the Institution’s serene, artistic, and intellectual aura against the brutality of murder, displaying a well-honed ironic touch. Although the investigation unfolds at a leisurely pace, without much tension, the plotline is intriguing, with enough twists (including a final big surprise) to keep things moving. The author captures enough of the everyday Chautauqua atmosphere, with detours through the lectures, concerts, and religious gatherings to make even newcomers to the series feel right at home at the retreat (“Around Mimi, some kids were enjoying ice cream cones. Others were chasing each other around the main fountain’s rim or splashing in the water spraying into its basin from the mouths of ceramic fish”). Sharply limned dialogue continues to build the series’ well-developed characters—plus, there are those reliably delicious cocktails whipped up by Mimi’s husband, Walt.
Another enjoyable beach read from an author who knows her turf.Pub Date: June 5, 2023
ISBN: 9798396720060
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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