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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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