Come for the title, stay for the domestic hijinks that’ll give the archcriminal a run for his money.
When the world’s most famous consulting detective and his criminal nemesis meet at the edge of Switzerland’s Reichenbach Falls, only one of them walks away. And not the one you might expect.
Returning in 1891 to her childhood home in Bavaria six years after she departed in disgrace to enroll in the medical school of Copenhagen University, Clara Mendel faces a chilly reception. Her beloved mother is dead. So is her stepfather, Alexander Alber. The family who remain—Alexander’s sisters, Dorothea and Margarethe; his brother, Klaus; and their father, Baron Alber—have their differences, but one belief unites them: Clara’s not really part of the family. Her stepaunts and stepuncle are especially suspicious of her financial legacy from their late brother and her motives for returning for Alexander’s exhumation. Aggrieved cousin Friedrich Alber demanded the exhumation because he claims that the bejeweled golden sword Ahnensäbel, a family treasure buried with Alexander by the grieving baron, is rightly his. But when the tomb is opened, the sword is missing. So the Albers mend fences among themselves long enough to freeze out Clara, as she apparently deserves for some long-unexplained scandal. What does all this have to do with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Moriarty? For quite a stretch, Anderson acts as if this question were pivotal, blocking out the names of the two archenemies when they appear in a letter and refusing even to allow Moriarty’s name to be uttered till long after most readers have worked out his role in the case themselves. What remains is the intricately layered saga of a deeply dysfunctional Bavarian family where both murder and Moriarty feel right at home.
Come for the title, stay for the domestic hijinks that’ll give the archcriminal a run for his money.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798892421010
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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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