A well-written and auspicious mystery series opener.
In this novel, a woman with a “macabre talent” for finding missing bodies seeks justice and personal closure when she helps police with a recent spate of kidnappings.
Eleanor Clay is brought in by the Bristlecone Springs Police Department for her unique brand of help in the case of missing 3-year-old Lizzie Barrett. She has found 18 children for the department over the last decade, and Det. Gordon Stanislaus is confident she will be successful: “She would find the child, and that child would be dead, case closed.” Eleanor does locate Lizzie, but the girl is still alive, albeit barely. This is new for Eleanor. As child kidnappings mount (three in two months), she aligns herself with CorpsPursuit, a volunteer consortium of forensic scientists who look for bodies in cold cases. “I came here thinking you might be able to help me understand what I’ve been doing all these years, and then maybe I’d have somewhere to start, you know, some way to figure out why it’s changed,” she tells Althea Giordano, formerly with the London Police and a botanist with CorpsPursuit. Eleanor is beset with considerable psychological turmoil. Her own daughter drowned years ago, and her body was never recovered. It drove a wedge between her and her husband, who are separated but not divorced, as well as her teenage son, Levi. Cooper has crafted a textured series opener that’s part gripping mystery and part an involving character study that sets up CorpsPursuit as a going concern. She writes with a keen eye: The letter seeking CorpsPursuit volunteers “had been printed out and posted on the Bristlecone Springs bulletin board and had since been nearly papered over with notices of community service days and for sale flyers.” Eleanor’s “domestic superpower” is a bit confusing at first (why do the police wait to bring her in on cases?), but the author populates the story with fleshed-out characters worthy of their own series, such as charismatic bicycle patrol officer Elan DePena, who initially refers to Eleanor as “the grim reaper.” The growth of their mutually beneficial partnership is one of the novel’s pleasures.
A well-written and auspicious mystery series opener.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781639885497
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
