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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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