A compelling, complex protagonist in a sultry, engaging, and lyrical, albeit disturbing, mystery.
In the sixth volume of a mystery series, dramatically set against the exuberant delights and eccentricities of New Orleans, a woman’s dark past is finally revealed.
The continuing saga of Jeff Chaussier and his stunning wife, Bryna Boudreaux, picks up several months after the explosive conclusion of the fifth installment. Bryna has given birth to a beautiful little girl, but upon seeing the baby, she suffers a mental breakdown. Convinced the infant is not hers, she accuses Jeff of all sorts of diabolical machinations. He brings the baby home, where his mother and surrogate second grandmother, Miz Rhonda, alternate caring for her. While Jeff is grieving, Bryna is receiving highly unorthodox “treatment” from disreputable therapist “That Bastard Henry.” But as fans of the series know, Jeff’s vast and entertainingly quirky assortment of family and friends will not allow Sanchez’s angst-driven, reluctant hero to languish for long. Jeff is quickly pulled back into the search for the anonymous, powerful “megalomaniac” behind the constant attempts to destroy Bryna. As Jeff repeats every chance he gets, he is an actor, currently working in a local theater owned and managed by his friend and mentor Don, who has his own scheme to pull the hero out of his emotional paralysis. Enter Rita, Jeff’s first love, back to tempt him into a new romance. The magic of New Orleans—the sights, sounds, aromas, tastes, colors, and music that poetically infuse the author’s Crescent City—is here, but there is far less violence and page-turning action this time around. The developing relationship between Jeff and Rita and the investigation into Bryna’s past amble at a languid pace until the high-octane conclusion. As always, it is great fun to spend time with Jeff given his love of words, passion for literary references, and snarky, often self-deprecating humor. But new readers are advised to begin with the earlier novels to best appreciate the many secondary characters in this enjoyable, melancholy story. This may—or may not—be the series closer. Sanchez offers a final tantalizing wink, but no promises, in his concluding author’s note.
A compelling, complex protagonist in a sultry, engaging, and lyrical, albeit disturbing, mystery.Pub Date: April 11, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-63-628315-7
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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