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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
