by Jane K. Cleland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2020
Fans of this long-running series will love the latest adventure, replete with plenty of suspects and antique lore.
A New Hampshire antiques dealer buys a house, finds a treasure, and—wait for it—solves a murder.
While Josie Prescott’s waiting for the lovely home she’s bought in Rocky Point to be renovated, she gets a visit at her office from Celia Akins claiming that Maudie Wilson, the house's former owner and Celia's aunt, is sinking into dementia and has misplaced a trunk. Even though Josie’s already walked through the entire house, she agrees to bring Celia with her to look for it. Maudie’s other niece, Stacy Collins, comes to the house as well, letting herself in the front door with her own key, which puts Josie off. While measuring the rooms with help from handyman Tom Hill and his girlfriend, Julie, Josie finds the trunk hidden away. It contains letters, a Bible, and a box that seems to be made of silver and gold and encrusted with jewels and has a decidedly ugly cat statue inside. Refusing to release the box to either niece, Josie visits Maudie at her assisted living apartment, where she turns out to be mentally sharp and a delightful conversationalist. A few days later, Maudie asks Josie to do an appraisal of the objects, which she's thinking of selling. If they’re authentic, the box and the cat could be worth a fortune. Maudie isn’t in her apartment when Josie arrives to pick up the items, but Celia’s dead body is. Naturally, Josie, who’s helped the police several times before, is worried about Maudie’s whereabouts. Both the nieces have been in financial trouble, but the chances of a high-stakes payoff distribute suspicion even more generously.
Fans of this long-running series will love the latest adventure, replete with plenty of suspects and antique lore.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-024277-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2023
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
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When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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