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: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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