Hubbard expounds on the ways winemaking and drinking are deeply embedded in French culture while her charming protagonists...
Hubbard’s trilogy of lovingly forged mysteries about the beauty and culture of France (Bordeaux: The Bitter Finish, 2014, etc.) draws to an end with a case much too close to home.
NYPD Detective Max Maguire is the product of a marriage between Hank, a now-retired NYPD officer, and Juliette, an aristocratic Frenchwoman disowned by her family for marrying him. In solving wine-related murders and investigating French culture and her own roots, Max has managed a reconciliation with her grandmother Isabelle—and now she and her parents have arrived in Burgundy to stay with her. Max has had an on-again, off-again romance with Olivier Chaumont, an investigating magistrate who’s moving to Paris to join the terrorism squad along with his longtime assistant, Abdel Zeroual. Olivier plans to stay at his family home in Burgundy while he and Max decide whether their love affair will lead to marriage. Meantime, Isabelle and her friend Anne are upset with the disappearance of a striking young American girl whose help with the grape harvest has led her to develop a love for wine. Lucy Kendrick, who claims to be 21, is really a 17-year-old searching for her biological father, who’s French. All the while, she’s pursued by the uncle who stuck her in a psychiatric institute in order to control her inheritance. Lucy was last seen at a party given by a drug-dealing private detective who was working both ends against the middle before being pushed off his balcony. She’s the object of several people’s desire, from a British B&B owner and photographer to the sullen teen son of one of Olivier’s childhood friends. The next time anyone sees Lucy is when she's shot during a local boar hunt and almost dies, and both Max and Hank are even more determined to solve both crimes than Olivier, whose friends turn out to be major suspects in another murder.
Hubbard expounds on the ways winemaking and drinking are deeply embedded in French culture while her charming protagonists solve murders—in this case, a complex puzzle that touches on the threat of terrorism lurking throughout France today.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0559-0
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
It's clearly Cat’s meow, and if you respond positively to her tempestuous carryings-on, then you'll probably forgive Iles...
A serial killer who puts the bite on victims is the villainous center of a long, long psychothriller, as southern Gothic as it gets.
Dr. Catherine (Cat) Ferry is a forensic odontologist, which is to say “an expert on human teeth and the damage they can do.” In four cases enlivening the New Orleans crime scene, however, the damage done is mostly posthumous, the victims having been snuffed first, gnawed on afterward. Cat loves being called in to help NOPD investigations. She also loves a hunky homicide detective named Sean Regan. At some point, Sean says, he will leave his wife and kids for her, but it’s a point of diminishing probability. Hard to really blame Sean, feckless as he is, since Cat’s not only bipolar, alcoholic and promiscuous but also apparently content to remain that way. And then, leaning over the chewed-upon corpse of Arthur LeGendre, she has a panic attack that amounts to an epiphany. Something’s wrong, she intuits, and makes a beeline for home in Natchez, Miss. Somehow, she has sensed a connection between the New Orleans murders and dark doings in her own past. Twenty years ago, when Cat was eight, her daddy was shot to death. A mysterious assailant, grandpapa Kirkland has insisted through the years, but Cat has always found that difficult to accept. Now, in her old bedroom in the family manse, she unexpectedly discovers forensic evidence that supports her skepticism—and discovers as well gleanings of a terrible secret. In the meantime, back in New Orleans, the investigation has heated up, and here too it seems Cat had it right. Murder in New Orleans and murder in Natchez are connected by the same kind of terrible secret.
It's clearly Cat’s meow, and if you respond positively to her tempestuous carryings-on, then you'll probably forgive Iles (The Footprints of God, 2003, etc.) his unabashed quest for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-3470-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
