A derivative, unchallenging mystery that delights without taxing readers.
When the shady employer of an American woman living in Rome is murdered, she decides to launch an investigation in this debut novel.
Maggie White has been in Rome for months now—she moved from the United States after her husband, Burt, was relocated there for work. She lands a job managing Masterpiece Tours, a company that offers “exclusive painting holidays” to affluent Americans. But not yet a week into the new position, she’s already considering quitting. So consumed by contempt for her insufferable boss, Lord Philip Walpole, she dreams of his demise, a disdain cheekily captured by Moore: “Just a painless, but fatal, heart attack that would strike her boss down in the middle of the night. When that failed to materialize, she imagined him taking a wrong step in front of a speeding bus. Today she moved on to poison.” Maggie’s dream becomes a grim reality when she finds him dead in his study, clearly murdered. The possible suspects are many—Lord Walpole was an unscrupulous man rumored to be an illicit entrepreneur involved in drugs and money laundering, and maybe fraud and blackmail as well. Much to Maggie’s surprise and dismay, the case is quickly closed by Inspector Orsini—he’s “lazy at best and incompetent at worst.” The haste with which he abandons the probe suggests corruption of some kind. Maggie decides to conduct an investigation of her own—she’s impressively sharp and resourceful—an undertaking that ultimately pegs her as a suspect.
Moore’s tale moves along well-established literary grooves, formulaically familiar to anyone who has ever read a murder mystery in which the protagonist becomes an amateur sleuth. In addition, the writing is no more inventive than the plot, brimming with clichés. On the same page readers will find “Be prepared to have your socks knocked off” and “Michelangelo would roll over in his grave.” But originality seems beside the point—the author is clearly not interested in either poetical prose or provocation, but rather easily consumed, breezily companionable entertainment. And this is precisely what Moore delivers, and with a kind of artistically unobtrusive skill. The plot is suspenseful without ever becoming too anxiety inducing, and the skullduggery surrounding Lord Walpole’s life is dark without ever turning disturbingly macabre. At the heart of it all is the charmingly innocuous protagonist, who seems bored by the banality of her own quotidian existence. Now that’s she enlivened by a greater purpose, she’s not eager to return to her former life: “Mrs. Burt White, bridge player, lifelong student, and lady who lunches.” Her character flirts with complexity—an achingly ordinary person who pines for excitement and, if given the opportunity, is so clearly capable of achieving more in life. The details of the murder are complicated enough but not torturously so—it is at least possible that readers will also crack the case, and the prospect of doing so may very well be the book’s most alluring element. For those in search of an enjoyably dramatic tale served without asking the audience for much in return—essentially fiction just a notch above passive fare—this fits the bill.
A derivative, unchallenging mystery that delights without taxing readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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