A satisfying read for those who like their mysteries with quality queer representation.
A murder disrupts the lives of academics in this installment of Hirsch’s mystery series.
Marcus George, a professor at the University of California San Diego, and Bob Abramson, a criminal defense lawyer, have been together for 18 years. When Marcus stops by his office over Christmas break to retrieve a student’s dissertation, he finds the dead body of a controversial colleague, Charles Silver. As the police chase multiple false leads, Charles’ widow, Emma, decides to hire a private investigator. Marcus recommends Jason Thompson, who used to work for Bob. Jason asks for Marcus’ assistance navigating the world of academia during his investigation (“I’m at sea in your world. I’m barely literate. I need your help”). In addition to voicing multiple controversial views, Charles had also been a serial philanderer, which leads to Marcus learning more secrets about his colleagues than he’d care to know and putting him in an uncomfortable position. Meanwhile, at home, Bob is struggling with turning 40 and the recent death of his father. When Bob makes a mistake that jeopardizes their relationship, Marcus struggles to keep his home and work lives together. This is the type of readable mystery that can be devoured in one sitting—the writing flows nicely, and the characters are lively and engaging. The investigation storyline lags a bit in the middle as Jason and Marcus interview several of Charles’ past paramours, all of whom have alibis; the encounters grow a bit repetitive, and the truth is discovered rather abruptly at the end. (The real culprit isn’t given enough page time for the reveal to be fully satisfying.) The family drama fares much better: Bob’s extended family is an integral part of his and Marcus’ life together, and the way the couple works through grief and relationship issues is touching and very well portrayed. Hirsch evocatively captures two gay men navigating middle age, career stress, and a long-term relationship together.
A satisfying read for those who like their mysteries with quality queer representation.Pub Date: June 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781942016960
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Pisgah Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
© 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.
