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
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
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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