A finely wrought page-turner, both funny and disturbing.
An out-of-work academic works to solve a baffling family murder in Elliott’s mystery novel.
Anthropologist Brian Coleman studies the history of human sacrifice; when one of the students at the Southern Baptist college where he teaches attempts (while half-naked) to replicate an ancient ritual involving snakes in the middle of the school’s quad, the adjunct professor finds himself out of a job. Brian returns in failure to his hometown outside of Boston, where his brother, Ethan, serves as caretaker to their ailing mother. Ethan suggests that, with Brian’s rare expertise in the violent things people do to one another, he might try his hand at writing true crime. “It’s crazy popular,” Ethan asserts. “I’ve seen these true crime authors on TV shows and most of them seem like total hacks to me. If they can do it, maybe you can do it, too.” It’s not as crazy as it sounds—Brian’s old high school crush, Nellie Mahon, has been embroiled in an unsolved criminal case ever since her husband and children were murdered during a home invasion eight years earlier. One of the invaders died that night, but Nellie is committed to bringing the other to justice, and Brian might be just the expert to help her do it. The case quickly turns out to be much more complicated than it seems, with connections that run throughout Brian’s hometown involving people he hasn’t thought of in years in ways he could never have imagined. The author’s talents as a prose writer lend weight (and humor) to what might otherwise seem a contrived premise: “The old neighborhood was a claustrophobic blend of dark and light, the glow of electric candles behind the windows of compact little colonials packed close together under sparse, sputtering streetlights, their roofs and the yards in front of them coated in old snow as neatly trimmed as cake icing.” Not all of the twists are completely believable, nor is the ending totally satisfying, but Elliot provides a fun ride from start to finish.
A finely wrought page-turner, both funny and disturbing.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798305126075
Page Count: 313
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2025
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
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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