An appealing cozy star is born.
A middling English mystery writer turns eager sleuth after discovering the body of her literary agent at a crime fiction festival.
Propelled by the recent death of her mother, 42-year-old Jane Hepburn, the shy and awkward 6-foot-tall author of six excellent, if not exactly bestselling, PI Sandra Baker novels, is finally attending the Killer Lines Crime Fiction Festival in the Cumbrian village of Hoslewit. She hopes to track down her agent and editor, who have not replied to her emails for two months, and to “network her socks off” with the famous crime writers who flock there every year. “These next few days will be the making of her, she has a feeling.” Little does Jane realize how much her life will change when she sneaks into the book tent during the off-hours to rearrange the displays to highlight her books. There she finds the body of her agent, the much-feared Carrie Marks, stabbed to death with a large dagger. Dismissed by DI Ramos when she suggests that a book may have been the motive for the murder, a dispirited Jane decides to return home until she runs into Carrie’s 22-year-old intern, Daniel Thurston. A fan of her books, Daniel convinces Jane that she, like her fictional sleuth, could solve the crime. If she succeeds, Jane might revive her writing career. The pseudonymous Nevin, a former publishing professional, has written a fun, tongue-in-cheek debut that spoofs the publishing industry and social media’s impact (BookTok, anyone?). Although the secondary characters are thinly drawn, Jane is a delight. Readers will root for the lonely sleuth as she makes new friends and develops joyful self-confidence. In some ways, her character arc is more interesting than the mystery’s resolution.
An appealing cozy star is born.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780593803004
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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