An engrossing read sure to delight lovers of murder mysteries and legal drama.
In Foster’s mystery novel, a lawyer finds an old friend murdered and believes his killing might be related to a controversial history he was writing.
In Coffee Creek, Texas, Alice Greer enjoys a happy existence practicing law—her principal client, retired federal judge Edwin Mahan, is a good friend— and she is soon to wed Ben Kinsear, a former law-school classmate. Alice’s bubble of cheer is burst when Mahan is discovered dead, having been shot on his own property, by Alice’s assistant Silla. Given his long career as a federal judge, the list of suspects is long and even incudes his son, Eric, and grandson, Johnny, both of whom were hard-up for cash and soliciting the octogenarian’s financial assistance. Alice, however, comes to believe his death might be connected to work he was doing. Mahan had hired her to oversee two different but ultimately related projects: the publication of a history he was writing of Coffee Creek and an archaeological dig on his property looking for “evidence of human history.” Mahan aimed to uncover the unalloyed truth of the region, including some “pretty grisly stories.” One of these was about the murder of an entire family committed by a man named Jasper Riley back in 1847, a macabre crime chillingly related by the author. The archaeological excavation, as it turns out, is less an exercise in scientific curiosity than an effort to find the missing bodies of those slain, part of Mahan’s relentless quest to determine the truth. This novel is the ninth installment of a running series and has all the virtues of its predecessors—a well-crafted mystery, riveting crime drama, and a light touch that keeps the story from turning too dark. Foster obviously has no ambition to traverse new literary ground; her prose is lucid and companionable, but never striking. The novel is a thoroughly enjoyable read nonetheless, combining easy entertainment and intelligence in the manner of a work by Agatha Christie.
An engrossing read sure to delight lovers of murder mysteries and legal drama.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781732722934
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Stuart's Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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