An appealing sleuth headlines a solid thriller with panache.
A Texas lawyer fights to protect her client’s valuable artworks—and solve the woman’s murder—in this seventh installment of a mystery series.
When Ellie Windom misses an appointment, attorney Alice Greer drives to her client’s home to check on her. She’s surprised to see Ellie’s horse inside the house, then discovers the 73-year-old widow’s body as well. Ellie had been pondering her will—what to leave her two sons and the daughter she gave up for adoption more than 50 years ago. As the woman’s executor, Alice, inventorying Ellie’s other home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, unearths a box stuffed with an artist’s prints. Apparently, someone thinks the prints are valuable, as Alice narrowly dodges intruders at the home and makes a tense drive back to Texas with the artworks. The lawyer now has her hands full; she’s dealing with Ellie’s sons, who have long feuded over their inheritance, making either one the woman’s possible killer. In settling the estate, Alice connects with Ellie’s birth daughter and the child’s father, Roger Preyer. But things get even more complicated when it seems someone, for whatever reason, is trying to kill Roger. Foster’s hero is, as always, whip-smart and affable. Alice skillfully manages her eternally busy professional and personal lives; in the midst of her amateur murder investigation, she defends the local library against a lawsuit that seeks to ban Harry Potter books. Many supporting characters are as likable as Alice, including her boyfriend, Ben Kinsear, and his daughters, who don’t think twice about chasing down potentially dangerous criminals. The taut mystery delivers a handful of twists and doesn’t make identifying the culprit easy. But the suspense is even better, with Alice’s Santa Fe trips exceptional set pieces. These entail nerve-wracking searches in a dusty attic with only a flashlight beam and noises that may or may not indicate that someone else is in the house.
An appealing sleuth headlines a solid thriller with panache.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73272-291-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Stuart's Creek Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
