A quirky premise and sharp twists and turns make this mystery page-turning fun.
Heras delivers a rollicking murder mystery—starring cats and dogs—set in 1950s New York City.
Flint Lockford, an Irish wolfhound, is a top investigative reporter at the Knickerbocker Gazette and is preparing to propose to his girlfriend, an Angora cat named Bianca Moon. Things couldn’t be better—until he is unexpectedly crushed by a falling piano. Left to wander the city as a ghost, he is quickly taken in by a group of fellow shades and waits for the detectives assigned to his case to figure out his death was murder, not an accident. Junior detective Morton Digby, a border collie mix, has a new partner, a Scottish terrier named J.B. Puddleworth, who is slow to figure out that they’re at the bottom of the pecking order at the precinct—they have a hard time convincing their superiors that the piano was cut loose on purpose. The duo begins to investigate suspects who might have had a bone to pick with Flint over one of his articles. Meanwhile, Flint’s bereaved girlfriend, Bianca, is spitting mad and not about to sit idly by while the detectives bungle the case. Along with her alley cat friend, Roxy, and the ghost of Flint whispering in her ear, she begins asking her own questions. Anthropomorphic cats and dogs living in 1950s New York is a tricky conceit to pull off, and the author does so with flair (“Adapting to apartment-style living was proving to be a big adjustment for the Scottie and his wife, especially as they had a family of Saint Bernards living directly above them”). There is a large cast of characters, both alive and spectral, and they are all vividly drawn without pulling attention from the protagonists. These are cats and dogs you’d want to be friends with (well, most of them). The period detail in the descriptions of the city is impressive, and the story does a deft job making light entertainment of a tale filled with murder and vengeful criminals.
A quirky premise and sharp twists and turns make this mystery page-turning fun.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781735317557
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Double Six Books
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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