Expect to learn a lot more about living horses than murder victims.
Despite its faithfully bird-themed title, blacksmith Meg Langslow’s 39th brush with murder has more to do with horses than crows. A lot more.
Now that Abel Abernathy’s 100-year-old father has finally died, his no-good brother, George, has popped up to demand half of Ezra Abernathy’s Virginia estate and, incidentally, sue Abel for devaluing the property by letting 47 Friesian horses graze there. Unable to cope with either his brother or his brother’s threats, Abel has asked locals for help. Since there are too many horses for Caroline Willner’s wildlife sanctuary or Helena Bannerman’s Hoof and Hearth rescue, they’re headed to Ragnar Ragnarsen, the heavy metal drummer who’s retired to Ragnarshjem, a farm he’s dedicated to all things goth. Managing, soothing, and caring for the herd requires the services of Marjorie Mewha, Ragnar’s stable manager; local vet Clarence Rutledge; Meg’s cousin Rose Noire; and Meg herself, whose experience with sudden death more than compensates for her lack of experience with horses after she discovers a dead body in Ragnar’s vast horse barn at the end of a long day. Sadly, the dead man isn’t George Abernathy, which would have been nice for Abel, but George’s sideman, Lefty Culverson, and George has an alibi for the time of his death. So he sticks around and serves the invaluable function of casting suspicion on Helena; on her stable manager, retired jockey Tomás Ortiz; and of course on Abel. The crows are upstaged not only by those Friesians but by the swans who attack Helena’s ne’er-do-well brother en route to a quietly satisfying denouement.
Expect to learn a lot more about living horses than murder victims.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781250407320
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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