A well-paced and quirky love letter to classic crime fiction.
In the second installment of Krummenacker’s Forever Detective series, a private investigator looks into a 20-year-old murder while also adjusting to his new life as a vampire.
In the summer of 1947, Rafael Jones, a former cop and now a P.I., is hired by his friend Jimmy Clarke to debunk a rumor that the upstate New York family home Jimmy recently inherited is haunted, so that he can more easily sell the property. The rumor, however, is shown to be true when Rafael wakes up to a gruesome sight: a ghostly reenactment of a woman’s murder. He’s no stranger to the supernatural; a few months before, he was turned into a vampire himself. He knows that to help the woman’s spirit move on, he must identify her killer and bring him to justice. After establishing a friendly, albeit limited, rapport with the woman’s ghost through music, and with the help of clairvoyant Methuselah “Medium” Brown, he learns that her name is Phoebe Travers and that she was killed in 1925 by an ex-boyfriend who was the father of her child—a mobster named Lorenzo Russo. Rafael, with the help of friends, former police colleagues, and long-distance girlfriend Clara Thomas, gets to work tracking down Russo, finding new evidence, and going head-to-head with the mob. As he investigates, he teaches himself how to control his new vampiric abilities and use them to his advantage—all while resisting the urge to bite someone. In this sequel to Forever’s Too Long(2019), Krummenacker presents a highly entertaining paranormal murder mystery. Rafael is a smart, compassionate protagonist who narrates his story with wry humor, especially when it comes to his vampiric condition: “It was nice to be sitting next to a pretty woman without feeling an itch around my teeth,” he says during his first interaction with Phoebe’s ghost. The cast of characters is impressively diverse and well developed, and the story moves quickly while offering sharp and detailed descriptions. Fans of vintage detective stories will enjoy this novel’s supernatural twist on a genre full of gruff detectives, organized crime, and femmes fatales.
A well-paced and quirky love letter to classic crime fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1705351147
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
