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
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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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