An agreeable (if conventional) continuation of Robin Hood’s adventures.
Friar Tuck tries to solve a murder mystery in Ruud’s latest Robin Hood novel, the second in a series.
Robin of Sherwood is back and up to his old tricks, sneaking into the Sheriff of Nottingham’s archery competition disguised as a fat, bearded, eye-patched yeoman named Hodden of Barnesdale. He takes first prize (of course) only to be discovered at the last moment. Luckily, the sheriff’s wife, Lady Maude (a huge Robin Hood fan), helps him switch into her own clothing to make his escape. Meanwhile, Robin’s spiritual advisor, Friar Tuck, learns of a mutilated body found in the woods outside the Benedictine Priory in Wallingwells. He has business in the area anyway—his godmother and her daughter live nearby—and the good friar hopes he can lend the nuns of the priory a hand in solving the ghastly murder, which locals have already attributed to “the work of some demon, or some vengeful ghoul.” The case quickly proves to be more complex than anticipated, and, on top of everything else, Robin’s paramour, Maid Marion, is captured by the Sheriff of Nottingham’s henchmen, who mean to extract from her the archer’s location. Can Robin step in and save the day, or will his merry band become the latest victims of Sherwood Forest’s vengeful ghoul? The author’s prose replicates the cheery, ‘Renaissance Faire’ tone associated with Robin Hood stories, as when Friar Tuck meets the Wallingwells prioress: “Tuck thought the prioress had an open, friendly face and manner. What he could see of her wimpled face was broad and sanguine, with high cheekbones, a small nose, and mouth, but large merry green eyes that sparkled at him as she greeted him.” Ruud has taken a few classic Robin Hood tales and woven them in and around a familiar detective plot structure, but he does little to offer the characters any freshness or depth. Fans of the mythos will likely be pleased by the author’s faithful re-creation, but those looking for contemporary complexity and nuance will be disappointed.
An agreeable (if conventional) continuation of Robin Hood’s adventures.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1645994497
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Encircle Publications
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
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