A clever, entertaining murder tale from a reliably engaging author.
In this ninth installment of a mystery series, nefarious doings are afoot at Merrill Manor, a boardinghouse on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution, western New York state’s unique summer artist community.
It is a tranquil Sunday in mid-July 2021, and Chautauquans are enjoying the freedom of in-person activities after last year’s Covid-19 restrictions. Then a cryptic invitation in the local e-zine, The Grapevine, causes a flurry of excitement: “A Murder Is Announced,” to be held at Merrill Manor that very evening. Not even the manor’s new owner, former Wall Streeter Betsy Kowalski, knows who placed the ad or what it refers to. Nonetheless, she prudently makes the appropriate preparations to welcome a larger than usual crowd for evening refreshments. As night falls, the manor’s eclectic residents—Kitty Nowak, Betsy’s childhood friend; Matilda Willoughby and her older mother, Evelyn, Betsy’s cousins; Frank Paddington and his sister, Amanda; and Sandy Bianchi, the Chautauqua gardener—gather. They are joined by neighbors Bridget Gallagher; her 20-something son, Eric; and retired Judge Jeremiah Hammerle and his third wife, Agnes. Last to arrive is Mimi Goldman, Chautauqua’s own amateur supersleuth. As the guests chat and sip their drinks, the lights go out. The front door opens, and a man steps into the pitch darkness yelling, “Stick ’em up.” Three gunshots follow, and Betsy’s ear is grazed by a bullet. But it is the mysterious intruder who lies dead in the entranceway. He is just the first victim in Pines’ low-action yet intriguingly complicated, twisty tale of greed and deception. The shadow of ever present danger is lightened by skillful, frequently witty dialogue and a couple of charming love stories. The challenge of finding the killer among a trove of suspects is only part of the enjoyment of the author’s crime dramas. She has filled these pages with an assortment of quirky characters of all ages. And the narrative is peppered with pieces of Chautauqua history, evocative descriptions of the serene (and manicured) landscape, and samples of the institution’s annual philosophical/religious/scientific lecture series. This year, the series is focusing on the nature and development of individual identities, a subject conveniently connected to the ultimate reveal of the killer.
A clever, entertaining murder tale from a reliably engaging author.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8832962368
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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