A high-concept romp that’s barely dated, despite that slur and all those footnotes.
The first of resident manager Pierre Chambrun’s 22 adventures in New York’s luxurious Hotel Beaumont, originally published in 1962, gives him exactly a week to find a killer before he (or she) strikes.
He may be famous and successful and wealthy and a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize laureate, but everybody hates Aubrey Moon, the writer, socialite, and Great Man who plans to spend $30,000 to entertain 250 guests at the 75th birthday party he’s throwing himself next weekend. The question is: Who hates him enough to have offered Pamela Prym, the call girl in Room 609, $10,000 if she’d kill him before the party—and to have threatened her with instant death if she took the money but didn’t carry out the mission? It’s too late to ask Pamela, because she’s hanged herself in her room. Incredibly, though, her correspondent makes the same offer to John Wills, who already has ample reason to kill the man who caused his own father’s suicide. John, who’s booked a room in the hotel and wangled an introduction to Chambrun on the grounds that he’s learning the hotel business—a cover story that doesn’t fool the wily manager—doesn’t want a murder on his conscience but isn’t in a position to return the payoff and doesn’t want to be killed either. More than whodunit, the question of what-to-do-about-it drives this ebullient franchise debut by pseudonymous mystery veteran Judson Philips (1903–89). Editor Leslie S. Klinger supplies conscientious footnotes that describe how to make dry martinis, identify Judy Garland and Toto, explain what a call girl is, and note that the phrase “a pansy inflection” is “an unfortunate anti-homosexual slur.”
A high-concept romp that’s barely dated, despite that slur and all those footnotes.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781464244728
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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