More an offbeat love story than a rip-roaring adventure but fun, with another sequel promised.
In the seventh volume of Sanchez’s Jeff Chaussier New Orleans Mystery series, the saga of Jeff and Bryna continues for another round of chaos and life-threatening adventure.
In this ever more complex soap opera, Jeff, devoted son of New Orleans, is now living in New York with his beautiful de facto wife, Rita Edwards. Yes, he is still married to his soul mate, Bryna Boudreaux, but life is complicated. Everyone has decided it’s best for his children (two with Bryna and one with Rita) to be raised up North because Bryna’s mental stability is still compromised. Jeff has given up acting and has turned to writing. Rita is a working actress, and Jeff is content as a stay-at-home dad. As the story opens, it appears that Jeff and Rita are vacationing at a beach resort. Then Bryna phones. She has been receiving enigmatic threats, and she needs Jeff’s help—the kind of help and commitment her current “roommate,” Harry/Harriet cannot offer. Seasoned followers of the series are likely to be shaking their heads at this turn of events. New readers are advised to read earlier volumes to get a better sense of the eccentric cast. Sanchez fills in some background, but this episode is best for those who have been waiting to find out what happens next. Jeff has issues with Harriet beyond the fact that she has been sleeping with Bryna. He suspects that this mysterious owner of an art gallery has ulterior motives, like everyone who has used Bryna in the past. This is just one of the quirky relationships in Sanchez’s latest episode. And despite a few well-choreographed action scenes, unconventional relationships are at the heart of this sexy installment. Bryna and Rita form a sisterly bond even as each of them is in love with Jeff. For his part, our perpetually conflicted lead character, who is the articulate, pleasantly sardonic narrator of the tale, loves Rita but will always be in love with Bryna.
More an offbeat love story than a rip-roaring adventure but fun, with another sequel promised.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-67-415434-1
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Southern Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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