An engaging and homey detective story that takes its time.
In Cooney’s mystery novel, the second in a series, a woman becomes an amateur detective when a man is murdered in her small town.
Doris Day Anderson is like many other 61-year-old women—aside from the fact that she recently solved a murder. Doris has sworn to put her nosy tendencies to rest ever since. However, when she takes an afternoon to go ice fishing with her sisters, Rose and Grace, Doris gets more than she bargained for when the trio reel in the leg of Lars Carlson, a fellow resident of Hallock, Minnesota and Rose’s boyfriend. When Rose requests that Doris find out if Lars was two-timing her with his ex, Etta, Doris gives in to her predilection for being a busybody and uncovers a townful of suspects in the process. Meanwhile, Doris is also contending with her feelings for the town’s sheriff, Karl. Doris loved Karl when they were younger, but she routinely rejects his advances because she is afraid of getting hurt. Cooney presents a cozy mystery animated by an ensemble of characters who bring the town of Hallock alive, though the standout is obviously Doris. Scenes that feature her questioning the townsfolk can feel a bit repetitive at times, but Doris is refreshingly funny, even amidst the tragedy surrounding her. Her humor veers toward self-deprecation, as when she greets Karl while wearing a robe that bares her unshaven legs: “If Karl had been disappointed about me declining his invitation for Saturday night, the mere sight of me must have aided in his recovery.” Cooney’s detailed prose is a strong suit, as evidenced in Doris’s description of a fellow resident: “His eyes, almost hidden in an abundance of wrinkles, shined with flecks of gold.” This story may be a bit too slow for some readers, but Cooney infuses her tale with so much charm that it’s difficult to find fault with the leisurely pace.
An engaging and homey detective story that takes its time.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781682011485
Page Count: 360
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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