A routine, professional whodunit providing yet more evidence that filmmaking is murder.
A film crew comes to the hallowed city of Cambridge, England, bringing in its wake disruptions, secrets, lies, and murder.
The most notable feature of the team making Viking Bride is the number of failed actors it includes. One of them, Ernest Eastman, is producing the film. Another, Alain Vernon, is directing. Still another, Devon Ashleigh, is the prop master—or, as he prefers to be called, the properties director. All of these are upstaged by Agnes Dermont, the star, whose failure is in the present tense: “She was never a great actress, but she was turning into a terrible one.” The only reason Agnes, who’s pushing 50, was cast as the Viking bride is that she’s married to Alain Vernon, who’s clearly miscalculated badly in seeking to establish himself as a force in the industry by helming a vehicle for his over-the-hill wife. So Agnes’ fatal stabbing by a prop knife while she’s in full costume in Cambridge’s Round Church proves a stroke of luck for many participants who’d feared she’d sink the production. The most obvious beneficiary is Magritte Grimes, the bride’s younger sister, Agnes’ unofficial understudy, and the performer who should have been cast in the title role from the beginning. Cambridgeshire DCI Arthur St. Just, who’s looking forward to his wedding to crime novelist Portia De’Ath, questions the interested parties fully aware that they differ from the suspects in most of his investigations because they’re “such renowned, professional liars.” Soon enough, the obligatory jealousies, rivalries, hidden romances, and blackmail attempts rise to the surface, making everyone look guilty. But fans will have no trouble spotting the killer even before the seasoned St. Just.
A routine, professional whodunit providing yet more evidence that filmmaking is murder.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781448314737
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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