This dogged sleuth will need time off to recover from this exhausting but enjoyable novel.
A werewolf detective runs up against more fellow supernatural beings than he’d bargained for in this installment of Carpenter’s series.
Iowa-based Joe Butler is ready for a vacation. Peter, a member of his werewolf pack, invites him on a trip to his family’s cabin on a Minnesota lake. Joe is introduced to Peter’s younger brother Parker, who is an amateur ghost hunter. They tag along with Parker’s team of paranormal investigators to a local hotel, where they encounter an angry ghost; shortly afterward, Parker is murdered. The local pack, and the deputy who is officially in charge of investigating Parker’s murder, don’t make much of an effort to investigate. Peter gets called back to Iowa by the pack leader, but Joe volunteers to stay to find Parker’s killer. Because of how the murder was committed, vampires, not ghosts, become the primary suspects (“Vampires can transform into bats and clouds of mist as well as exert control over electronic devices”). Joe struggles to find anyone with a motive to kill Parker; he soon learns that the Minnesota woods are full of supernatural creatures working in opposition to each other, and that Parker may have been collateral damage. Joe gets help from an unexpected source: Parker’s ghost appears to him, explaining that recently minted spirits can’t cross over, and that more ghosts are being forced to return from the other side. Joe must determine who is behind this situation and Parker’s murder. Carpenter has fashioned this second volume of his Joe the Werewolf series into an educational outing for his lead character that will prove equally compelling to his readers. In addition to the were-beasts, aliens, and vampires with which he’s familiar, Joe here encounters sasquatches, ghosts, and hodags (evil creatures that spring from the ashes of cremated oxen). The revelation that so many exotic beings are living among humans is what makes Carpenter’s work fun—readers will be engaged while encountering various supernatural creatures along with Joe, who gets roped into the role of peacemaker trying to get the various groups to work together against a common threat.
This dogged sleuth will need time off to recover from this exhausting but enjoyable novel.Pub Date: June 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798281544696
Page Count: 292
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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