A delicious mystery full of dark labyrinthine curves.
Working as a nanny for the wealthy Harrington family, Rita Murphy is anxious about being secluded in England's beautiful yet ominous Forest of Dean for the summer. She should be.
Toggling back and forth between the events of 1971 and present-day London, Chase deftly constructs a shadowy puzzle born of multiple daughters with tangled connections to the titular Foxcote Manor, lurking in the dense forest. Recently separated Sylvie Broom frets over her mother, who has been hospitalized after a fall, as well as her daughter, Annie, whose troubled relationship with a man named Elliot has his posh mother, Helen Latham, harassing both Annie and Sylvie. As Sylvie deals with Helen and her own mother, Chase begins to untwist threads connecting her back to 1971 Foxcote Manor, where a gangly 20-year-old Rita is recovering from a broken engagement. Her employer, Walter Harrington, has sent her and his family (perhaps banished would be more accurate) to his broken-down ancestral home in the aftermath of his wife Jeannie's postpartum breakdown and the subsequent fire that ruined their posh London residence. While the glamorous Jeannie recovers from the stillbirth, Rita tends to rambunctious 5-year-old Teddy and his 13-year-old sister, Hera. Once in the forest, however, characters and events obstruct any healing. First, Marge shows up, a brash housekeeper who offers obscure advice—watch out for weird Fingers Jonson in the woods—and strange gifts, such as the woodsman's boots for Rita’s big feet. Then, Don Armstrong, Walter’s best friend and Jeannie’s ill-concealed lover, descends on Foxcote, trailing testosterone fumes and asserting his dominion over everyone. The situation is already precarious when Hera and Rita discover a foundling baby in the woods. Suddenly, Jeannie’s maternal instincts kick in, but then a dead body is also found in the woods, and everyone's world upends.
A delicious mystery full of dark labyrinthine curves.Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54238-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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