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
A sly reminder that “movies, like politics, are unreality. That’s the point of them.”
A posthumous novel Crichton (1942–2008) wrote in 1973 under the pseudonym John Lange, in between The Andromeda Strain and The Great Train Robbery, but left unpublished till now.
As Harvey Jason knows all too well, the life of a movie publicist is no fun. Now that he’s spent three weeks in Tucson, Arizona, for the shooting of the western Bloodrock, Harvey’s come to know every watering hole in town and every scandal among the cast and crew. Except, that is, for the scandal that threatens to break out when Arthur McDougall, the screenwriter who’s come along for possible rewrites, is found dead in his hotel bathtub. The studio head back in Hollywood preemptively dispatches insurance investigator Harlow Perkins—“a regular Sherlock Holmes”—before any of the insurance companies backing the production can hire him themselves. In short order, the dislikable Perkins lines up interviews with leading actors Clete Williams and Brenda Conrad, promiscuous second lead Sally Oldman, producer Charles Mann, director Tom Franklin, and the rest of the crew. Whoever he talks to, he’s accompanied by Harvey, shadowing him under the orders of his boss, publicity chief Sam Appelbaum, who’s far from convinced that news of the incident will be bad for business. The characters are no more memorable than Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlet, but Crichton, as in the SF novels that would make him famous, sweats every detail of the background, and aspiring filmmakers will learn as much about the mechanics of moviemaking as they could from most film textbooks. If you think the big reveal falls flat, just keep on reading to the end.
A sly reminder that “movies, like politics, are unreality. That’s the point of them.”Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798212514309
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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