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
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
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