A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.
A widowed brain surgeon investigates a murder in Smallwood’s mystery novel, a prequel to her detective series.
Santa Christina is an idyllic California town shaded by the lemonadeberry–covered slopes of Mount Reposo. It’s a quiet place, where the most fearsome predator is the occasional coyote. Dr. Ogy Bradley is shocked when he returns from a conference to discover that his neighbor and close friend, noted hillside gardener Babby Blenheim, has been killed in a mudslide. (It appears the sprinklers in her orchid garden malfunctioned.) Ogy, a widowed brain surgeon, can’t believe that Babby’s death was an accident. The person tasked with investigating the death is Ogy’s friend from the diving club, Detective Tor Abelove of the Santa Christina Police Department. Tor has always been a surfer first and a cop second, but he’s still a pretty good detective. He figures out that Babby was bludgeoned to death prior to the mudslide, but there’s no clear motive and no obvious suspects. Who would benefit from the orchid lady’s death? A local burglar? Her adopted niece and nephew, who would inherit her money? A rival gardener? A local politician with an acrimonious history? As Ogy and Tor look into the case, they quickly discover the ground beneath their feet is just as unstable as Babby’s hillside orchid field. Smallwood is a prose stylist, and her serpentine, often surprising sentences give the novel its playful, puzzling atmosphere: “Luis Paredes’ tactic of protecting his best second-hand shirt by sitting out a paintball war inside a cardboard carton had two major consequences—the attempted murder of his brother, and the apprehension of a burglar who for months had eluded police.” She hides the ball by nearly overwhelming readers with character detail and backstory, but the maximalism is part of the fun. New readers will be glad to know that previous Cop & Doc mysteries are waiting to be read.
A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.Pub Date: July 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798990455207
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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 2025 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.
