A solid mystery with a skilled protagonist and room for development in the sequel.
In this novel, a young woman’s death is considered a suicide, but to a detective, an audio tape of her demise sounds like murder.
Nick Severs, a former Kansas City street cop and now the first and only police detective in Pine Lake, Colorado, has seen 57 bodies in his life. The 58th is 25-year-old Lisa Benoche. Her death is considered “textbook suicide,” and Brenda, from the coroner’s office, tells Severs that around these parts, “September is not a homicide month.” But Severs has questions. The crime scene is “neat,” as if staged. An audio recording from her smart home device plays back “the sound of a struggle, but there were no signs of a struggle.” Further, as his friend Mike, the victim’s co-worker, tells Severs, “She was smart, pretty, and had a great job….Why would she kill herself?” This will be Severs’ first solo death investigation, and he must navigate the requisite revelations (Mike, who brought the recording to the detective’s attention, turns out to have had an affair with Lisa) and red herrings. Meanwhile, as the case progresses, Severs is haunted by a recurring nightmare of a young boy’s horrific demise. It begins to create tension between him and his beloved girlfriend, Claire (“This wasn’t them. They never fought”). He turns to Sam, a former college friend, now a therapist, who reluctantly agrees to help him “figure out heads or tails of this.” Severs makes an impressive first impression in Chernov’s series opener. The author has a good eye for the procedural portion of the book. As Severs makes his initial rounds of Lisa’s property, he mulls possible pieces of evidence: “It was like trying to reconstruct the plot of one play based on a closet stuffed with props from a dozen.” Chernov also creates a strong sense of place (“Every now and then, a cool breeze rolled through the trees, stirring up the scent of warm cedar”). Nightmares aside, Severs is coolly competent and refreshingly free of the self-inflicted personal demons meant to give such characters a pulse.
A solid mystery with a skilled protagonist and room for development in the sequel.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 9798986329819
Page Count: 361
Publisher: Heathen Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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