Even for true-crime podcasters, the truth is tough to find in this brisk, entertaining thriller.
A missing woman and a rediscovered religious artifact drive a fast-paced chase by two podcasters and a possible con man.
When Anna McDonald and Fin Cohen leave Glasgow for a family weekend at a rental house, she expects minor disasters. She and Fin are work partners in a popular true-crime podcast, but their domestic situation is intertwined as well—her ex and his ex are now a couple, and all of them are co-parenting Anna’s two young daughters. They all get along, but a new addition to the mix is Sofia, Fin’s young, pretty, poison-tongued girlfriend. So Anna is glad to be distracted by news of the disappearance of a young woman named Lisa Lee—a story that’s a prime candidate for their podcast. Lisa is part of an online community centered on urban exploring, UrbEx for short—people who break into abandoned properties and livestream what’s inside. Lisa vanished from her home near Glasgow shortly after she aired a visit to a creepy French chateau full of religious artifacts. And now one of those artifacts, a sealed silver box, is making news. It’s about to be sold at a Paris auction house, and there are rising rumors that it’s a long-missing object called the Voyniche Casket, said to contain a mysterious proof of the resurrection of Christ. The seller is anonymous; the question for Anna and Fin is what its sale has to do with Lisa’s disappearance. Then Fin gets a text from someone named Bram van Wyk wanting to know if they can help him contact Lisa. As the pair piece together Lisa’s background and the history of the Voyniche Casket, they also research Bram and find that he’s a well-known South African antiques dealer with his own sketchy past. When Anna and Fin flee their family holiday for work-related reasons back in Glasgow, Bram, rather alarmingly, shows up at Anna’s house, offering to help find Lisa. He has his surly 12-year-old son, Marcos, in tow. Bram charms them into coming to Paris for the auction with him (he has a private plane), kicking off a mad dash around Europe. It’s clear he’s a con man, but how much so? Are Anna and Fin unwilling players in an elaborate ruse, or are their lives in danger? Mina keeps the plot charging at a breathless pace, and Anna is an engagingly tart narrator.
Even for true-crime podcasters, the truth is tough to find in this brisk, entertaining thriller.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-24272-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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