Catchy hook, draggy investigation, and a solution from out of left field. At least that pricey coffin doesn’t go to waste.
A boorish businessman just can’t stop dying.
Even though Sterling Chaney was a drunken lout who cheated on her at every opportunity, his long-suffering wife, Camilla, still arranges the send-off of Sterling’s dreams, complete with a burnished-bronze Promethean casket that sets his estate back a cool $30,000. Which turns out to be money well spent, since, in the middle of the eulogy, who should appear at the door of the church but the dearly departed himself, drunk as a skunk but still able to appreciate Camilla’s last generous gesture of love? Camilla’s appreciation, on the other hand, is fleeting. Days after she learns that the corpse found in Sterling’s Porsche actually belonged to a thief who stole it shortly before the fatal crash and welcomes her errant husband back, she finds orange lipstick on the collar of his shirt and throws him out. Meantime, Sterling’s become a celebrity, appearing on news shows across the nation and drawing the eye of investigative reporter Valeria Cannata. She turns a feel-good piece about the man who crashed his own funeral into an exposé of his phone-sex business, complete with interviews with the women who work there. Now Camilla is not only a wronged wife, she’s also a social outcast, married to a man whose vast fortune rests on the exploitation of the most desperate. When he crashes his brand-new red Ferrari and dies for real, she’s in a jam: The police have ample cause to arrest her, and the judge won’t order release on bail. Only her best friend, death investigator Angela Richman, believes she’s innocent. Angela takes on the whole police force, including her boyfriend, to prove her point.
Catchy hook, draggy investigation, and a solution from out of left field. At least that pricey coffin doesn’t go to waste.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-72785-029-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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