Generic thrills for fans who don’t want to look too closely.
The second case for Tennessee freelance investigator Vera Mae Boyett is both more and less than a sequel.
A series of bizarre kidnappings introduces the Time Thief, who’s drugged and abducted three victims, held each of them for 48 hours, and then released them unharmed in remote locations. The disappearance of Nolan Baker, a local reporter who’s been following the case hoping to strike it big, moves Vera’s first love, Lincoln County Sheriff Gray Benton, to pass along an urgent message from Nolan’s mother. Elizabeth Bogus Baker has overcome her disdain for Vera—who, along with her sister, Eve, has long harbored unsavory family secrets—long enough to plead with her to find Nolan and bring him home. Hardly has the search begun when Vera begins to get messages eerily reminiscent of taunting notes she received from the Messenger, a serial killer she brought to book 13 years ago after he captured her and her then–Memphis PD colleague Lt. Eric Jones. Dr. Palmer Solomon, the psychiatrist who confessed to being the Messenger, has been aging in prison ever since and is now dying of cancer. But the spate of new messages, along with other details of Nolan Baker’s kidnapping, so completely echoes his earlier M.O. that Vera must face the unnerving question of whether the recent crimes are the work of a copycat or an accomplice of the Messenger. Webb, who’s much more interested in multiplying than resolving complications, unmasks a minor-league perp and then quickly moves on to supply more details about the Boyetts’ family history, plunge Vera and Eve into mortal danger, and reveal the identity of the killer, who despite the title, is not someone closer than you think.
Generic thrills for fans who don’t want to look too closely.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781662516191
Page Count: 317
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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