A delight for fans of intelligent, strong-willed sleuths like Maisie Dobbs and Phryne Fisher.
A prequel for Lane Winslow: Not yet a sleuth in the wilds of British Columbia, she’s on a dangerous mission for Britain during World War II.
Given her facility for languages, Lane is working as a translator, a dull job that gets exciting when her boss reluctantly asks her to meet “someone off the east coast of Scotland and take him home to a nice Christmas with your grandparents.” Then he gives her a gun and snowshoes. Her cover story is that she’s meeting a cousin for a ramble and then taking her fiancé to her grandparents’ for Christmas. In fact, she’s picking up Marc Nowak, a double agent being dropped off by a German submarine. In the meantime, Lane’s grandparents are making do with a sweet helper who’s a hopeless cook. While out collecting greens for decorations, Gran finds a military bag hanging from a tree limb and gets strict orders to hide it until it can be picked up. On the train to Scotland, Lane meets Freda Beauville, a friend from Oxford with a dim view of Britain’s chances in the war. They part in Edinburgh, where the unexpectedly heavy snow proves a real challenge for Lane, who’s due at the rendezvous in two days. Using the snowshoes, she reaches a farm where she wangles a meal before setting off again to an inn, escaping an amorous landlord and reaching the shore in time to overpower Freda, who’s pretending to be the escort. Once Freda is jailed, Lane and Marc set off for the cottage of Lane’s grandparents, where more danger awaits.
A delight for fans of intelligent, strong-willed sleuths like Maisie Dobbs and Phryne Fisher.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781771514828
Page Count: 180
Publisher: TouchWood Editions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
The lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.
Christmas is coming, but so is trouble for South Lick, Indiana.
Robbie Jordan, owner and chief cook at Pans ’N Pancakes, returns from solving a murder in California just in time for the holiday rush, which is complicated more than most Christmastimes by a number of surprises that disrupt her circle of friends. First, her assistant, Danna Beedle, gets a visit from Marcus Vandemere, a young biracial man claiming to be her half brother, an assertion that thrills Danna despite the doubts of some friends and relatives. Next comes a fire that nearly destroys the home of anesthesiologist Dr. William Geller, a racist whose wife, Tina, reportedly left him years ago. When a skeleton turns up in the attic, the not-so-esteemed doctor has some explaining to do. Robbie’s nemesis, Detective Octavia Slade, who recently married Robbie’s former boyfriend, is more willing than usual to accept help from Robbie, who has a knack for finding things out. The next to die is Tina’s twin, Toni, who knew Marcus from karate classes. Toni’s husband is the prime suspect, but Robbie’s convinced the fatalities are connected. With help from her boyfriend and her network of friends, she attempts to clear things up before the killer spoils her holiday by adding her to his list.
The lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2317-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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