A middling mystery seasoned with period detail and toothless threats to the future success of Charles Dickens.
A third return to 1835 London sets two problems for parliamentary reporter Charles Dickens: unmasking a murderer, and clearing himself of an accusation that could put paid to his career and his impending marriage.
Nothing says Christmas like caroling outside the countinghouse of Emmanuel Screws, and nothing dampens the Christmas spirit like having a chained corpse fall from an overhead window to the ground before the eyes of Charles and his horrified fellow carolers. Soon after the killjoy is identified as Jacob Harley, Screws’ partner, his body inside its coffin vanishes from the custody of the undertaker Dawes. But that’s the least of Charles’ headaches. He’s already scrambling to disprove the allegation of serving maid Madge Porter that he fathered Timothy, the son of Madge’s late sister, Lizzie. Moved by the holiday spirit and simple humanity, Charles has taken up the infant and placed him with pregnant actress Julie Aga, the wife of his fellow journalist William Aga. His solicitude for the defenseless child is a distinctly bad look for his fiancee, Kate Hogarth, and a worse one for her father, George, who, as editor of the Morning Chronicle, holds a great deal of power over his employee’s future. When the prospective publisher of Sketches by Boz begins to back away from his contract, it seems the only thing that will redeem Dickens is proof that he’s not Timothy’s father. Oh, and solving what by now is a pair of murders as well.
A middling mystery seasoned with period detail and toothless threats to the future success of Charles Dickens.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1717-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.
A vainglorious viscount is murdered in this 1910-set mystery—Montgomery’s first novel for adults and the launch of the Stockingham & Pike series.
As the novel opens, narrator Stephen Pike, not yet 20 years old and fresh from a two-year stint at a London prison, finds himself in Cornwall at World’s End, taking a job as a second footman at a remote manor house. (So far, so Downton Abbey.) He arrives at a time of high anxiety: Lord Stockingham-Welt has seen to it that the windows of Tithe Hall have been boarded up in anticipation of Comet Halley’s appearance—“This time, it will be the end of the world,” he insists. The comet spares the earth, but the night doesn’t spare the viscount: The next morning, he’s found dead in his study, which was locked from the inside, with an ancestral crossbow’s bolt in his eye. Who better than un-alibied recent inmate Stephen to take the blame for the murder? To Stephen’s aid comes Miss Decima Stockingham, the viscount’s elderly great-aunt, who makes Downton Abbey’s Violet Crawley seem like an earth mother. A frustrated scientist, Miss Decima hated her late nephew—“Conrad stole my inheritance, my sister, my career…everything”—but she hates Stephen’s victimization more. The book’s ingenious reveal, which hinges on a long-buried Stockingham family secret, is reached through a combination of Miss Decima’s scientific-inquiry-fueled deductions and Stephen’s precocious puzzling (the story features both a hedge maze and a spot-the-difference-style brainteaser). The odd-couple intergenerational sleuthing duo is a welcome new arrival on the historical-mystery scene, with Stephen’s squeamishness about Miss Decima’s filterless fuming a mainstay of the book’s unremitting humor (Stephen: “I’d never heard language like it…and I’d just spent the last month sharing a bunk with a man called Filthy Mick”).
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063458772
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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