A mesmerizing whodunit that astutely explores the legacy of mental illness.
In Rose’s mystery, a 40-year-old Chicago cop investigates a murder with few leads while wrestling with her own troubled youth—and the lies she’s told about it.
Mila Taylor didn’t grow up wanting to be a detective, but her tortured early years pushed her in that direction. After her mother died of cancer, she was raised by an “uninvested father” who was seemingly incapable of holding down a job. Her only solace was her relationship with her older sister, Farah, but one night in 1996, during a tempestuous dispute, Mila’s father murdered her sibling—a crime that Mila witnessed when she was only 12. The father is acquitted by reason of insanity and sent to a psychiatric ward. Profoundly burdened by the grim loss as an adult, Mila throws herself into her work, and in 2024, she begins working on a new case: the killing of Sullivan Maxwell, the introverted owner of a dual cafe and bookstore on the Near West Side. There’s scant evidence pointing to a culprit, but Mila discovers that Sullivan’s business partner and best friend, Davis Parks, wanted to sell the shop against Sullivan’s wishes. In Rose’s grippingly suspenseful crime drama, Mila attempts to track down the deceased’s mysterious girlfriend, Natalia, and unravel Davis’ lies—but her own deeply guarded secrets begin to reveal themselves, as well, which complicates her life further. The author’s delicate restraint is remarkable, as only slowly and gradually does a fully coherent story emerge—a crystallization of a narrative fog that readers will find riveting. Rose raises provocative questions about the nature of mental disorders and the extent to which they’re genetic inheritances or the consequences of lived trauma; indeed, Mila poignantly struggles with these issues herself: “I’m a heartless monster. Incapable of attachment. Just like my dad.” Overall, this is a psychologically searching drama that’s far more about the frailty of the human mind than a murder investigation, and it’s composed with captivating subtlety.
A mesmerizing whodunit that astutely explores the legacy of mental illness.Pub Date: May 23, 2025
ISBN: 9798891559622
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2025
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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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