A solid whodunit whose characterization is more intriguing than its central puzzle.
In Huddle’s mystery-series starter, a feisty private investigator and forensic genealogist investigates when her family’s building goes up in flames.
Iris Raines was abandoned as a child by a client at the San Antonio law office of brothers Addison and Justis Raines. Later, the same attorneys adopted her. Now 33, she runs her own agency, Raines Investigations, and Raines & Raines—the law firm that first gave her a home—is her largest client. Both businesses operate from temporary offices as their shared building, the Hampe Ewald, undergoes renovations. One night, Iris watches in horror as the Hampe Ewald explodes, killing two people. The disaster worsens when it transpires that the general contractor failed to secure insurance, leaving Raines & Raines liable for the deaths and facing bankruptcy. Determined to uncover the truth, Iris looks into the case with the help of Sean Galen, a computer genius and her best friend. The investigation comes to involve blackmail, missing photographs, and a string of ritualistic murders that may connect to the conflagration. Meanwhile, Iris grapples with lingering PTSD from a kidnapping she experienced the year before—a struggle that threatens both her focus on the case and her burgeoning romance with handsome Barron Claver, whom she meets on a mystery writers’ cruise. Huddle, who’s a retired PI and forensic genealogist herself, grounds the story in realistic detail. However, the legal jargon may deter some readers, and Iris’ genealogy work adds little to the central investigation. The novel’s greatest strength lies in its depiction of Iris and her heartfelt connections with those around her. Her witty banter, especially with Grover Delacourt, the San Antonio Police Department’s deputy chief of investigations, brings a sense of warmth that acts as a balance to the story’s darker elements: “Damn, Iris, it’s eleven at night,” he complains at one point. “Gee, thanks for that temporal update,” Iris responds. “That whole big hand/little hand thing still baffles me.” The mystery wraps up predictably but satisfyingly, making it a rewarding read for fans of private-eye procedurals.
A solid whodunit whose characterization is more intriguing than its central puzzle.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798999482204
Page Count: 335
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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