Come for the promise of mystery, stay for the long goodbye.
Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus’ 27th outing is also their last.
Peter, who’s already retired from LAPD Homicide, doesn’t want to step down from the Greenbury, New York, police until he’s closed one last case: the murder of Pauline Corbett, found in the woods not far from where disabled Loving Care client Bertram Lanz disappeared three weeks earlier along with his caretaker, Elsie Schulung, who was Pauline’s lover. But this assignment is upstaged by a crisis closer to home even though it’s taken place in California. Emergency room physician Teresa McLaughlin, the mother of Peter and Rina’s foster son, Gabe Whitman, has been attacked and seriously wounded by villains who’ve kidnapped her 5-year-old boy, Sanjay. The obvious suspects are Terry’s estranged husband, Devek, a cardiac surgeon whose gambling has left him owing $2.5 million to the mob, and Devek’s impatient creditors. When Terry’s transcontinental phone call to Gabe ends in a cliffhanger, Peter advises him to call his father, Christopher Donatti, who's not a nice guy but who’s still in love with Terry even though she left him 10 years ago. Donatti swoops down in his private jet, carries Terry off to his Nevada superbrothel, showers her in gifts and amorous declarations, and rapes her repeatedly. Kellerman cuts conscientiously back and forth between the two stories, but Peter’s murder case, which is never all that mysterious, can’t hold a candle to Terry’s even less mysterious but shockingly toxic tango with her abusive ex, and Rina is left standing on the sidelines with nothing to do but hug her children.
Come for the promise of mystery, stay for the long goodbye.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-062-91049-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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