A lengthy but smart and diverting whodunit.
In this debut mystery, a construction project in progress is the site of murder, theft, and the occasional betrayal.
Billionaire David Johnsson has been planning a winery at his massive California estate. But as he fired his architect and has been butting heads with the contractor, the project remains incomplete. He turns to architect Neil Thornton for help. It’s a hefty job that Neil willingly takes, though he’s unprepared when an individual knocks him down on David’s estate—possibly the same culprit who ransacks his car and his office and pilfers his project drawings. Meanwhile, local police detective Sean Andrews, working a missing person case, ultimately discovers a body on David’s property. And there’s more: David is an avid art collector, and eight paintings are gone from his unfinished vault. Over in New York, art dealer Jennifer Singh contacts FBI Agent Marcus Little. Evidently, an attorney representing an anonymous collector sold an auction house a painting that’s likely stolen. This opens an investigation that soon intersects with the case on the West Coast and involves numerous people, such as David’s brother, Keith, with criminal pasts. It seems only a matter of time before a killer’s surprising identity comes to light. Rutherford’s extensive novel includes copious architectural details. But as they appear intermittently, they never derail the sound murder mystery unfolding throughout. Neil’s entanglement in the homicide case is believable, especially since someone at one point considers him a suspect. In addition, there’s a double-crossing or two as well as unnerving moments, like Neil’s potential new client Karl Stroughmann’s making the architect wary. Although Neil is meek but likable, the most memorable characters are of the delightfully shady variety, from Keith to David’s ex-wife, Georgia. Rather than one big reveal, answers come gradually in the latter half, and the killer may not be easy for readers to unmask.
A lengthy but smart and diverting whodunit. (author bio, drawings, blueprints)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-57662-6
Page Count: 402
Publisher: E&O Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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