A warm and diverting mystery yarn.
In Corvo’s cozy mystery novel, one in a series, a park ranger must discover who’s murdering a group of local high school alumni.
Maudy Lorso is the head park ranger at Stone’s Throw State Park in Michigan. She loves her job, and she loves living in the town of Stone’s Throw, which is on the shore of Lake Michigan. Maudy’s life isn’t without complications: She’s running for a seat on the Village Council, but her opponents are wealthy and influential, and they make no secret of their scorn for her. If she’s elected, she can help protect the town and park she loves, but if she loses, her rivals will funnel more money into tourist attractions that will negatively affect residents and the land. On top of that, her friend and neighbor, Eli, has recently confessed his love for her. Maudy hasn’t reciprocated, because she doesn’t want to ruin their friendship, but it seems like it might be ruined anyway. Eli’s acting tense around her (“The cloud of awkwardness is so thick it could choke someone”), and it only gets worse when his old high school friends come to town to attend their class reunion and celebrate Halloween. On the day after Halloween, one of Eli’s friends is found poisoned. Eli seems to be the prime suspect, but Maudy can’t believe he’s the culprit. She and her beloved dog, Martin Short (aka Marty), put the detective skills they learned in the Stone’s Throw Mystery series’ first installment to use to pursue the real murderer. This is a cozy mystery par excellence. While the issues raised in the story—including murder, addiction, and corporate greed versus environmental protection—are serious, the narrative always feels endearing, even joyful. Maudy is a lovable character, simultaneously competent and a bit of a bumbler—it’s easy to root for her and her friends. The language is a little cliched at times, but it doesn’t interfere with the agreeable atmosphere. Readers who like their mysteries with a little bit of romance will especially enjoy this entry.
A warm and diverting mystery yarn.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798898202132
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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