Few readers will be surprised by the denouement, but they’ll have passed a pleasant few hours anyway.
All the restrictions imposed on London in 1944 can’t prevent a most private murder among a tiny circle of neighbors and guests in this ingenious wartime cozy from the pseudonymous Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958).
A disturbance outside the studio of impoverished artist Bruce Manaton turns out to be bumptious Special Constable Lewis Verraby arresting Neil Folliner for the murder of his great-uncle, Albert Folliner, in the adjoining house. Not a bit of it, protests the young Canadian; coming to visit and see if he could be of any help, he’d entered the open front door and climbed the stairs to find the old pauper (or miser?) already shot to death. A pair of witnesses at either end of this block of Hollyberry Hill narrow the list of alternative suspects to half a dozen. But no one would suspect Folliner’s devoted charlady, Mrs. Tubbs, and at least four of the others have cast-iron alibis. As Manaton painted actor André Delaunier in a cardinal’s robes, his other guests, Home Office veteran Robert Cavenish and young government chemist Ian Mackellon, were playing chess in the same cavernous room. Only the painter’s sister, Rosanne Manaton, who spent most of the evening preparing dinner in the kitchen, could conceivably have slipped out. Chief Inspector Macdonald of the CID scrupulously avoids licentious theorizing as he questions the impossible suspects and gradually reveals a powerful motive involving 25 Hollyberry Hill.
Few readers will be surprised by the denouement, but they’ll have passed a pleasant few hours anyway.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1509-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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