A clever whodunit with a smart, appealing detective.
In this third installment of a mystery series, a sleuth just wants a romantic day trip but instead gets roped into another murder investigation.
Amanda Pennyworth is looking forward to relaxing on Amapas Beach in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with her boyfriend, Romero Morelos. But all hopes of fun in the sun are dashed when she finds a woman bludgeoned to death (“Blood from a deep gash in her forehead covered her face like a mask and collected in a viscous dark puddle on the sandy soil next to her head”). The victim’s name is Danielle Maglin, and she, along with some of her friends, was on the same boat that took Amanda and Romero to the isolated beach. The person who committed the crime is most likely someone who was on the boat with Danielle—probably one of her pals. As Amanda helps the local police investigate, she finds out Danielle was both loved and hated by those around her. She was a magnetic woman with a complicated life. Her friends repeatedly describe Danielle as charming, popular, and beautiful but also a troublemaker who knew everyone’s secrets. One of the last people to see Danielle alive was her close friend Terry Blanchard, who is more than willing to point a finger at other guests on the boat trip. Sol and Marcie Spiegel, who desperately wanted the house Danielle bought, are strong suspects. Amanda returns to the United States and is invited by Blanchard to a dinner party with all the guests from the fateful cruise. As the murder suspects are gathered together, Blanchard questions each one and tensions run sky high. Soon, Amanda may have more on her plate than just one murder mystery. Gilbert deftly utilizes his skillful sleuth in this installment. This is a classic locked-room whodunit with a fun cast of characters who keep the plot unpredictable and intriguing. Amanda is an endearing protagonist who uses her keen eye to try to solve this intricate puzzle of greed and jealousy. The story’s two distinctive settings create a captivating contrast and shine a new light on the characters as they return home and grow comfortable—perhaps too comfortable. This volume will thrill fans and entertain newcomers to the series.
A clever whodunit with a smart, appealing detective.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781639886494
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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