A keen, charming amateur detective headlines a snappy murder mystery.
A reporter based in Austin, Texas, digging into a seemingly random murder, unearths a bevy of dark secrets in Conrad’s mystery-series entry.
The best part of Callie McFee’s post-work evening run is chatting with Barney, an unhoused man who always sits on the same park bench on her route. Thanks to her brother, State, a local homicide detective, she’s one of the first people to hear the tragic news of her friend’s fatal shooting. Just as shocking is the notepad that cops find on Barney, which suggests he was compiling information on Callie herself. This discovery makes the McFees nervous; she’d confided quite a lot to Barney, and one particular tidbit—her power-broker father’s dementia—is one that the family has long fought to keep secret. The authorities surmise that Barney’s death was a mugging gone wrong, but something more sinister may be afoot. As Callie looks into the case, she discovers that he wasn’t the man she thought she knew; he’d jotted notes about other people as well, including Callie’s new “bench buddies,” whom she meets over the course of her investigation. These were Barney’s friends, but if there’s a chance that he uncovered something incriminating about one of them, they’re all potential suspects. One could easily say the same thing about the McFees, however—and indeed, Callie and State do what they can to prevent their father’s condition from going public. Circumstances become more dire when one of Barney’s friends is brutally murdered. Callie vows to get to the bottom of it all, even if it means confronting a merciless killer.
Conrad’s whodunit offers exemplary plotting, opening with a scene that reintroduces series hero Callie and establishes Barney as her warmhearted confidant. It’s not long before there’s a murder, followed by a string of surprises, such as what Barney’s pal Daisy finds when she pokes around his former bench. Callie is a smart and sublimely practical gumshoe; she knows exactly what police do at a crime scene, and although she doesn’t immediately tell State about every piece of evidence she finds, she keeps him informed as much as possible. The seemingly simple case turns increasingly complex, especially after more characters enter the narrative—each new “bench buddy,” for instance, comes with a fresh personality and a backstory that, on occasion, isn’t entirely true. Standouts among the cast include the gruff but reliable State; Gil Morales, Callie’s father’s plainspoken “number two”; and a few suspects whom Callie gradually learns to trust. The book’s abundant dialogue scenes pop, and Callie picks up many details through casual conversation. Her deductive skills are without question, as well; she takes her time deciphering the shorthand in Barney’s notepads, and she notices when people slip up (although maybe not right away). As in the preceding installment, Sins of the Family (2022), the humor is quick and sharp: Gil, for example, sidelines a discussion with Callie by noting, “I need to get you ready for a funeral.” “I’m not that bad off,” she jokes, to which he clarifies, “Not yours.”
A keen, charming amateur detective headlines a snappy murder mystery.Pub Date: April 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781735555591
Page Count: -
Publisher: Mason Hill Inc
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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