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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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