A suspenseful and layered—if somewhat overstuffed—whodunit with well-placed plot turns.
A police detective headed for retirement tries to solve the murder of an Oscar-winning actress in Boyd’s mystery.
Less than 24 hours after Alyce Justice wins the Academy Award for Best Actress, her housekeeper finds her deadin her Los Angeles home, stabbed multiple times in the chest. Lucas Horne, an LA homicide detective set to retire in a week, is assigned the case with a partner, Mike Norelli, who’s 17 years his junior. Justice held a private party on Oscar night, and the detectives discover no signs of burglary or evidence of a struggle in her home. Her husband, famed actor Brandon Bradford, becomes the primary suspect, but there’s a major complication: He didn’t spend the night at the house on the night of the murder. To make matters worse, Justice’s sister, who attended the party that night, has also disappeared. As the investigation develops, Boyd introduces new characters to provide more angles on the case, such as BJ Larson, a seasoned journalist who’s been working on a feature about Justice for months. The quick introductions to all these players can feel overwhelming in the early sections: “Everyone who should be there was: Linda Christian, the coroner’s investigator, and her assistant; Kirk Bell, the SID criminalist, and his assistant; and Hank Alonzo, the crime scene photographer.” This tendency eases, however, once all the players and pieces are in place, and Boyd moves quickly from one chapter-ending cliffhanger to the next. As Horne digs deeper, uncovering several surprising twists, he begins to feel the accumulation of years spent investigating senseless killings. This revelation, alongside the one-last-job setup and the connections he draws between Justice and his late wife, feels a bit tacked on—a way of providing more backstory in a plot-driven narrative. Still, readers will undoubtedly stay hooked until the very end, because Boyd remains surefooted in planting red herrings and leading readers astray.
A suspenseful and layered—if somewhat overstuffed—whodunit with well-placed plot turns.Pub Date: March 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781637890370
Page Count: 375
Publisher: Gordian Knot Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2024
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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