Visually delightful backdrops and charming characters add appeal to a book lover’s mystery.
Bibliophiles unite to solve several puzzling murders.
Storyton Hall is a charming Virginia resort that celebrates books, but in addition to the extensive library in the public spaces, the inn is home to a secret repository of rare books and other items. After centuries during which her ancestors have guarded this collection, even having to fight off violent incursions, Jane Steward has decided to donate, return, or sell the whole thing to give her family a quiet future. In the meantime, Jane, a widow with two young sons—Fitzgerald and Hemingway—is looking forward to taking a vacation with her partner, Edwin Alcott, in charming Oyster Bay, North Carolina, home of her friend Olivia Limoges. Their bungalow at the Admiral’s Inn turns out to contain a skull in the shower and a warning written on the bathroom mirror: “Your story is over.” The skull is apparently a prop belonging to author Justin St. James, who recently stayed at the bungalow, so Jane and Edwin ignore what must be a prank. The next day, Jane and Olivia are hunting for treasure with a metal detector on Olivia’s private beach when they hear Edwin’s cries for help just as they find St. James dead on the shore. Edwin has stepped on stingrays, and the barbs that pierced his feet bring on a dangerous allergic reaction that sends him to the hospital. Since St. James died from an overdose, the police suspect a drug dealer, especially after Jane finds the body of one of the man's clients. But Jane is less convinced after learning that St. James based his books on the painful stories of real people, including Olivia, who have cause to hate him.
Visually delightful backdrops and charming characters add appeal to a book lover’s mystery.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781496729507
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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