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
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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