Andrews lays on the good cheer with a trowel. Even the rabbi’s wife gets a cameo.
Ornamental blacksmith/general do-gooder Meg Langslow’s Christmas activities entangle her with a fellow resident of Caerphilly, Virginia, whose domestic life is even more chaotic than hers.
Unlike Meg, who’s surrounded by members of her own cheerfully argumentative family as well as the Shiffleys, Caerphilly’s somewhat more benign version of the Snopeses, Harvey Dunlop has chosen to surround himself with stuff—objects of dubious value he can’t bring himself to throw out. So Meg, her friend Caroline Willner, Meredith Flugleman of Adult Protective Services, and other concerned members of Helping Hands for the Holidays have banded together to strong-arm, er, help and encourage him to go through his house with a shovel and relocate his treasures to an empty building Randall Shiffley owns in the hope of deep-cleaning the house and then urging Harvey to move on without moving his prized junk back in. Except for the unwelcome appearance of Morris, Ernest, and Josephine Haverhill, the cousins who seem to be Harvey’s only living relatives, the preliminaries go well. But when Meg shows up at Harvey’s for the main event in the decluttering marathon, her host is unresponsive, brained with a spittoon in his garage. As Harvey hovers between life and death, Meg plunges into his family history to uncover a motive for the murderous attack. Readers patient enough to wait for any mystery, or for that matter any significant conflict, to develop will be rewarded when their own suspicions about whodunit are proved exactly right.
Andrews lays on the good cheer with a trowel. Even the rabbi’s wife gets a cameo.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-76012-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Plenty of hair-raising adventures combine with more cerebral pursuits in this enjoyable tale.
A murder on a train carries echoes of another fateful railroad trip.
Library director Lindsey Norris and her husband, Mike Sullivan, are in Chicago attending a conference. During a book restoration lecture on the last day, someone leaves a bag under Lindsey’s seat containing a first edition of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train inscribed from the author to Alfred Hitchcock, making it potentially very valuable. Lindsey turns it over to conference head Henry Standish, a man with a checkered past that’s earned him multiple enemies. Lindsey and Sully, along with Henry and many other conference participants, had taken a train from the East Coast to Chicago for the conference; now, as they settle into their roomette for the return trip, prospects for a pleasant ride turn sour when Lydia Armand—who took over Henry’s job after he was accused of fraud—turns up. That night, after some nasty verbal jousts, Lindsey hears thumping noises from the next compartment and sees a person shrouded in black in the passageway. The next morning, Henry is found murdered in his compartment. Upon the arrival of a dangerous snowstorm, the police remove passengers to a local inn near Briar Creek, Connecticut, Lindsey and Sully’s hometown, while they investigate. When the valuable book turns up in Lindsey’s laptop bag, she takes it to the police, while Sully, a boat captain, heads out in the storm to deliver food to nearby islands. Much to her consternation, Lindsey is unable to contact Sully, and a search discovers his boat drifting offshore. Clues from the boat indicate that Sully may have been spirited away, and Lindsey resolves to search for him while she seeks a motive for Standish’s murder.
Plenty of hair-raising adventures combine with more cerebral pursuits in this enjoyable tale.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780593639337
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Half a loaf—the first half.
Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is nearly buried under a series of varied homicides that play like a mix tape of her own greatest hits.
Veronica Kwalwasser is found decapitated inside a plastic bag labeled “Here’s Johnny!” in a deserted privy, her severed eyeball thoughtfully left in a package on Tempe’s porch. Gangbanger Miguel Sanchez is missing an ear when he’s discovered. Frank Boldonado has been hanging from a tall tree for a long time. All of them have been killed in different ways, but Tempe tells Det. Donna Henry that she’s certain their deaths all have something in common. And she’s right: They’re all copycat versions of otherwise unrelated deaths Tempe investigated years ago. Clearly the killer has a special grudge against Tempe, but in “America in the age of rage,” where everyone reserves the right to unlimited anger against anyone else, how can she begin to look for the motive that drives the killer? And given the wide array of malefactors who have it in for her, how can she narrow the field before her daughter, Katy Petersons, a toughened Army veteran who’s gone suspiciously missing, ends up paying the ultimate price for whatever it is that her mother once did? Reichs supplies a great hook, a double helping of homicides past and present, and all the meticulous forensic details and throwaway cliffhanger chapter endings you’d expect from this celebrated series, though the motive behind the murders is significantly less interesting than the ghoulish crimes themselves.
Half a loaf—the first half.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982190-02-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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