Carter ends with a bonus: There’s plenty of corruption left for her detectives to fight in the next round.
Who’s more evil, the hired killer who’s blown into a Missouri town or the cops who’ve vowed to protect its citizens?
As the Baxter Police Department’s chief of detectives, Delia Mariola has seen many victims of violence. But few of them rival Case Dixon, a high school kid who wandered away from a local hangout utterly incapable of fending for himself and wasn’t seen till three days later, when he was found strangled to death after prolonged torture. Everybody in town—from Case’s father, a lumberyard owner on the board of Baxter’s Chamber of Commerce, to police commissioner Vern Taney—thinks it would be just great if Case’s nasty schoolmate Bard Henry, who’s threatened him repeatedly and was seen just outside the spot he disappeared from, did time for his murder. But even after they arrest the youth, neither Delia nor Blanche Weber, the detective in charge of the case, thinks Bard could have planned or executed a crime that required this much foresight. And they’re right. The real murderer was Johnny-Boy Witten, an assassin currently calling himself Paul Ochoa, who loves his work so much that he passes the time in torture killings while he’s waiting for a chance to tag Theo Diopolis, the autoworker he’s been hired to kill. Professional as he is, Johnny-Boy narrowly misses his chance to put down Diopolis. Now the pressure is on him to make good on his contract even as Delia and Blanche dig up evidence of a much wider ring of civil servants and cops in their own department. The results are as suspenseful as they are ultimately predictable.
Carter ends with a bonus: There’s plenty of corruption left for her detectives to fight in the next round.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781613165805
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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