A sexy, edgy, entertaining, and frequently dark tale with a temptingly eccentric Crescent City backdrop.
In this fifth installment of a mystery series, an actor and his beloved fiancee return to New Orleans to marry, only to discover that enigmatic evil forces are still threatening them.
In Sanchez’s Big Easy, family and close friendships are everything and drama is everywhere, which is especially appropriate considering his star character, Jeff Chaussier, is an actor. This volume opens with a wedding scene filled with riotous colors and the full complement of quirky characters who have populated the author’s earlier novels. The church is overflowing with flowers. The beautiful bridesmaids, who just happen to be female impersonators from the Cupcake lounge, are crying loudly, when finally “the shimmering snow sculpture that was Bryna” walks down the aisle to take Jeff’s hand in front of the altar. As they are about to say their vows, she turns, tears streaming down her face, and runs out to the street into a waiting car. The groom is crying and the bride is missing, but the wild “Irish Channel” celebration continues well into the night. Despite the frivolity—and there is plenty—the aborted wedding is a foreboding of all the trouble that still lies ahead for the duo. But first, Jeff and Bryna get to enjoy a sex-infused, extended pre-honeymoon, frolicking on a deserted Bahamian island, while his five brothers and assorted compatriots confer about who could be behind the endless stream of assassins doggedly devoted to murder and mayhem. Unfortunately, it is decided that Jeff is needed back in New Orleans to help flush out the coterie of evildoers. Fans of the series have a distinct advantage over newcomers, who may need a score card to keep track of all the players. But Sanchez does eventually fill in many of the complicated backstories. Secret forays through the swamps and bayous outside of New Orleans and a hefty dose of violence keep the adrenalin-pumping action steady. Jeff’s self-deprecating narration, although occasionally repetitive, is engaging, philosophical, and often touching. The explosive final chapters demand another installment.
A sexy, edgy, entertaining, and frequently dark tale with a temptingly eccentric Crescent City backdrop.Pub Date: July 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-094055-4
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 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.
