A heinous crime gets viewed through several lenses in this scintillating whodunit.
A mystery examines the lasting impact of a cold case on one family.
Sawyer’s novel starts with an obituary for a key character: Abigail Melinda Joss, who died in Toronto on Feb. 1, 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Abigail gained notoriety for being acquitted of the murder of her husband, Montgomery, in 2000. The obit ties together the narratives told from the perspectives of three people affected by Monty’s killing: his daughter, Katelynn; his mistress, Rosalind Wallen; and his son, Robitaille. As the only child of Abigail’s who can be located, Katelynn is called back from her home in France to write the obit for her estranged mother. She is supervised by her aunts Agnes and Yolande, Abigail’s sisters, who are extremely worried about upholding the reputation of the “prominent Raddefords of Des Moines, Iowa.” It takes four months of arguments among Katelynn and her aunts to finish the obit. The piece is seen by Rosalind, Monty’s true love. Young Monty and Roz had planned to be wed until Abigail tricked him into proposing. Roz is also the only living person who knows the truth about Monty’s murder. Rob, who changed his name after leaving home, becomes a homicide detective and is handed the cold case of Monty’s murder by his police chief. Rob searches for clues to the killer’s identity. In this book, Sawyer effectively reveals how a violent act can affect many people. The author shows how Abigail’s history of brutality was covered up by her relatives, who were more concerned with the family’s prestige. As a result, Abigail was viewed as eccentric, not dangerous, despite her past actions. Other characters appear amiable but they once got battered by Abigail’s wake. Sawyer’s decision to tell the story from three distinct viewpoints is quite productive. Each narrator has pieces of the puzzle, which gets assembled over the course of the well-crafted tale to illustrate how destructive the self-absorbed Abigail was. The story, which traces her actions over decades, uncovers how her narcissism helped shape the decisions made by other characters. She drives the events in this intriguing work.
A heinous crime gets viewed through several lenses in this scintillating whodunit.Pub Date: June 19, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-21802-156-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Information Plus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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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