Just what the doctor ordered for fans of this mystery series.
Every time a Detroit physician gets involved in a crime, something bad happens, and the suspicious death of a city employee is no exception.
In this latest installment of a mystery series, Benjamin Dailey, a doctor and police adjunct, agrees to see a woman who has been brought to the City Hospital emergency room. Sandra Wells, a staff assistant in the mayor’s office, was found in a deserted building that had been set afire. She is not burned, but she is suffering from severe smoke inhalation. While she has Dailey’s business card in her purse, he only vaguely remembers her. Despite not having privileges at the hospital, he risks legal action by executing a bronchoscopy. He is reprimanded by the staff physician, who accuses him of performing “rogue surgery,” but after that doctor takes over, Wells dies. She is the first in a growing body count that includes Cal Finney, “the toughest sombitch” on the police force, who was friends with Wells. She gave him a spreadsheet to hold on to that she told Finney was “the key to the kingdom.” Shortly thereafter, Finney was shot, and now the spreadsheet is missing. Someone thinks Dailey has it, resulting in the ransacking of his garage and the cautionary threat of a severed finger in his front seat. This is the fifth Dailey mystery. He’s come a long way since a false malpractice accusation cost him his first marriage and his medical career and left him homeless. Now, the appealing protagonist has a son and a wife who longs to have a second child but is unable to get pregnant despite five years of fertility treatments. Like the surgeon he is, Rontal operates with precision in filling in newcomers to the enjoyable series. He is stronger with the medical stuff (“She had some swelling over the dorsum of her nose”) than he is with the mystery. But he does manage a line or two that are a cut above (“Friends to the end, and this was the end”).
Just what the doctor ordered for fans of this mystery series.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-60381-735-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Camel Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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