Griffo launches a series with something for everyone: eager young newshounds, well-seasoned sleuths, and a stash of Italian...
Life is anything but serene for a widow making a new life for herself in Tranquility, New Jersey.
Alberta Ferrara Scaglione has precious few kind memories of her life as a wife and mother in New Jersey. She didn’t quarrel with her late husband, Sammy, but she never really loved him either. Her daughter, Lisa Marie Scaglione Maldonado, is another story. Alberta and Lisa Marie fought likes cats and dogs until the Maldonado family finally moved to Florida—“and not the fun part,” as Lisa Marie’s daughter, Jinx, points out, but the landlocked burg of Eufala. So Alberta considers it more or less her due when her elderly Aunt Carmela leaves her a home on beautiful Memory Lake in the idyllic town of Tranquility. Her life gets even better when Jinx, having dutifully attended Chipola College, near her Florida home, high-tails it back to the Garden State, where she gets a job at the Upper Sussex Herald. Only one cloud shadows the grandma-granddaughter reunion: the body of Alberta’s childhood frenemy, Lucy Agostino, floating practically outside Alberta’s front door. But even this cloud is silver-lined. The search for Lucy’s killer provides the perfect excuse for Alberta and Jinx to bond. Supported by Alberta’s sharp-tongued ex-nun sister, Helen, and their sister-in-law Joyce, grandma and Jinx do what feisty women everywhere do best: solve a murder.
Griffo launches a series with something for everyone: eager young newshounds, well-seasoned sleuths, and a stash of Italian recipes (some gluten-free) to boot.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1394-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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