An intriguing murder mystery with lighthearted elements and a satisfying twist.
In this first installment of a mystery series, a deli worker decides to investigate a homicide.
Amanda Knightly, a deli worker at Bob’s Finer Foods in Oak Hills, Illinois, gets involved in solving a murder when Olivia Hager, a difficult customer, is found dead. Olivia is an acquaintance of David Stedman, a friend of Amanda’s son. David, a barista and aspiring coffee shop owner, is arrested for the crime. He’s a suspect because Olivia wanted the $5,000 she had invested in his business returned. But Amanda thinks that David is innocent (“I know David. Someone else murdered Olivia”). During her investigation, Amanda uncovers articles about David’s immediate family members who had all died and an interview with his former boss speaking to his reliability, which further convince the sleuth that he’s not the killer. Through her connections and eavesdropping at the deli and the Dark Roast cafe (which she temporarily manages while the owner is on vacation), she learns about Olivia’s romantic history and other failed business ventures. Amanda also notes vulnerabilities in the security system of Valley Lane condominiums, where Olivia lived, including easily accessible entrances and possibly overlooked surveillance footage. With this information, she identifies Raymond Cartel, a maintenance employee for both the condominiums and Dark Roast, as a potential suspect. But he is assaulted and a note is found that reads “Stedman is guilty.” Meanwhile, Amanda’s daughter, Brittany, has various connections to Olivia through former classmates. Due to these threads, the stakes rise as the murderer is potentially closer to Amanda’s family than anticipated, and she must work quickly to solve the case before David is wrongly convicted. Overall, Klein excels in planting tantalizing tidbits throughout the story while maintaining the integrity of the world she has carefully built. When the identity of the killer is discovered, it is a genuine surprise. Although a story about a murder investigation usually employs a noir tone, several scenes, such as Amanda and an ally’s ploy to visit David in prison by evoking a policeman’s mother, are charming. Unfortunately, some episodes slow down the novel’s pace, as when Amanda learns how to make a schedule for the Dark Roast. Nonetheless, fans of cozy mysteries will want to add this to their collections.
An intriguing murder mystery with lighthearted elements and a satisfying twist.Pub Date: March 12, 2025
ISBN: 9798991733502
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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