A meager mystery, but it’s always worthwhile catching up on the interactions between Nora and her friends.
A bookstore owner and her pals have more than one mystery to solve.
Nora Pennington is the owner of Miracle Books in Miracle Springs, North Carolina, where she's surrounded by a group of good friends who call themselves the Secret, Book, and Scone Society: Hester Winthrop, a baker; Estella Sadler, a salon owner; and June Dixon, a hotel guest manager. And ever since a fire at her home, Nora’s been living with her partner, Sheriff Grant McCabe. Now she’s thrilled to be hosting her first-ever author evening at Miracle Books. Cozy mystery author Allie Kennedy is promoting her new book, The Dry Bar Murders, and Nora and her staff and friends have their hands full getting ready for that event as well as an upcoming Halloween Fun and Fright Night, which will include activities for kids as well as a demonstration by psychic medium Lara Luz. McCabe, for his part, is trying to catch someone dumping hazardous waste all over town. Nora’s biggest disagreement with McCabe is over his deputy, K9 handler Paula Hollowell, who goes out of her way to be nasty to Nora and her friends. The day of the Halloween event, Lara arrives with her boyfriend, Enzo Russo, and a bad cold. Nora is surprised when Hollowell arrives and even more so when Allie Kennedy shows up, glaring at Hollowell. The psychic readings start well enough, but suddenly Lara turns pale, gasps for air, and dies despite Hollowell’s CPR attempts. A frantic Enzo shoves Nora, giving her a concussion. Lara evidently died from a bad reaction to Narcan—it turns out she had a heart condition that didn't interact well with the drug—and the investigation shows that she’d angered many people by accepting valuable pieces of jewelry that had belonged to the dead, which Enzo sold in his pawn shop.
A meager mystery, but it’s always worthwhile catching up on the interactions between Nora and her friends.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781496743824
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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