A smart and insightful little mystery that leaves a big impact.
When a shady land developer starts stiffing local contractors, it’s up to EMS captain / amateur sleuth Brighid Doran to expose the scheme.
Aiken’s slow-burning crime drama—part of the author’s Trowbridge Vermont series—is wrought with a careful precision that makes every mundane occurrence somehow feel foreboding. Why, readers might wonder, is the protagonist/narrator offering such granular observations about ancient Rome’s impact on Vermont roads and signage, or how wounds are properly treated? (“With my sterile gloves, I open the small bottle of cyanoacrylate glue. Starting at the bottom of the canyon, I lay in a small line. I pinch the tissue closed.”) All the details feel important, as though they should be noted and categorized for later reference. The hyperawareness gives readers an understanding of the way Brighid’s inquisitive mind operates; she gets an opportunity to put that brain power to work while methodically flushing out Ernie von Eberbach, a Rhode Islander with big plans to develop a ski lodge and single-handedly reverse Trent Valley’s unemployment statistics. Brighid already has a full plate as an emergency first responder and the wife of a career military officer who comes back from every uncertain deployment significantly worse for wear. Brighid should be considered one of the good guys, but she’s instead cast in the role of the outsider in her small town, a state of affairs that does more than anger—it hurts. “We are the bad guys. The local workers are the good guys.…Ernie’s generous hand is the source of all goodness and light,” she laments. Themes of perception and fraud are deeply interwoven throughout the quietly unspooling yarn. Along the way, Brighid never misses an opportunity to direct some hilarious ire at the Trent Valley Viewer, the local newspaper responsible for getting the “Ernie von Asshole” story so wrong. Brighid has only begun to sleuth—and sure enough, all those painstakingly parsed breadcrumbs pay off with a completely satisfying twist ending.
A smart and insightful little mystery that leaves a big impact.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781963511284
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Flare Books/Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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