A light, enjoyable page-turner that will particularly appeal to fans of the Northern California coast.
In Carroll’s latest mystery series installment, amateur sleuth Trisha Carson investigates a suspicious open water swimming accident that resulted in a gruesome death.
Trisha, whose day job is working in the guest services department for the San Francisco Giants baseball team, attends the funeral of wealthy financier and open water swimmer Andy Barlow, who was chopped to pieces by a yacht propeller while training in San Francisco Bay. Andy was in business with his brother, Martin, who was secretly jealous of his sibling’s athleticism and annoyed by his preoccupation with swimming instead of working; he was also sleeping with Andy’s wife, Justine—or so says Harrison, Andy’s son, who wants Trisha, a skilled amateur detective, to look into his father’s death. She’s initially skeptical that foul play was involved, as the U.S. Coast Guard already ruled Andy’s death an accident. Still, she agrees to investigate with the assistance of her sister, Lena. She interrogates Justine, who’s either evasive or clueless about her family’s finances and seems to be hiding something about her relationship with Martin. Trisha later finds out that Justine wanted to break things off with Andy, and that hired goons from Las Vegas had come to collect on hisgambling debt. As more of Andy’s unsavory behavior comes to light, the suspect list only grows longer. Carroll’s novel features snappy dialogue, brisk characterizations of the Barlow family and their entourage, and generous helpings of technical detail about open water swimming. It also shows the author’s clear affection for the canyons, flora, and coastline of the San Francisco Bay Area: “Sausalito gleamed in the morning sun….Fall was San Francisco Bay’s summer, complete with warm weather, dazzling Pacific Ocean sunsets, and cloudless nights.” Overall, it’s a conventional but enjoyable whodunit with a plot that offers readers a round robin of familiar suspects; as such, the final reveal is unsurprising but still satisfying.
A light, enjoyable page-turner that will particularly appeal to fans of the Northern California coast.Pub Date: March 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781644567951
Page Count: -
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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