A game whose rules keep changing provides something for everyone, even if it’s not completely fulfilling for anyone.
What looks at first like a sedate locked-room puzzle blossoms into a full-blown conspiracy yarn featuring a most unlikely heroine.
Hannah “Cookie” Cooke is a New England–based interior designer whose two specialties are constructing painstaking scale models of crime scenes like the Lizzie Borden house, which doesn’t pay much, and restoring upscale houses, which pays a lot more. Her business, the Ministry of the Interior, gets a commission from neurosurgeon Chuck Halsey and his wife, Lana, founder of Lana Pura home textiles, which is challenging from the get-go. Lana’s determination to enlarge the house’s kitchen is thwarted by the placement of its chimney, which can’t be touched because it’s integral to the whole structure. Together with mason Harry Deluca, who has a complicated history with her, Cookie devises a workaround, but it doesn’t work well enough to prevent the kitchen from filling with smoke. None of this bothers Chuck, whose affair with Cookie ends when he’s found stuffed into the chimney and burned to death after his housewarming party. Will Cookie ever get another job? Absolutely: hospital Communications Director Wendy Teller insists she update the office of her husband, psychiatrist Simon Teller. Simon himself has no interest in the project, but he’s definitely interested in Cookie. As Cookie’s unsettlingly adulterous pattern solidifies, the ensuing complications extend from a second death to an international drug smuggling scheme to a reopening of the Lizzie Borden case. Some readers will feel exalted and uplifted by these wide horizons; others will merely feel baffled.
A game whose rules keep changing provides something for everyone, even if it’s not completely fulfilling for anyone.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781641298087
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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