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
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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