An artful and totally immersive cold-case mystery.
A newly minted PI goes back to her hometown to solve a long-ago disappearance in Gillingham’s debut mystery novel.
When Anna Fischer left the Chicago public defender’s office for a new job with an elite private investigation firm, she never expected her first case would be to solve the crime that’s haunted her for her entire adult life. Fifteen years earlier, Anna’s best friend, Betsy Thompson, went missing in their hometown of Penn’s Point, Wisconsin. “I know more about her disappearance than I have ever told anyone,” Anna reflects when she gets the assignment. “The moment I have been avoiding for the better part of the last decade has finally come.” She should refuse to take the case—there is a clear conflict of interest—but she feels she can’t say no, professionally or personally. She heads back to the small, secretive town of Penn’s Point, surrounded by all of the things she’d tried to leave behind, and starts digging into the scant clues: a police report, some old interviews, a necklace. Did Betsy’s allegedly violent boyfriend murder her? Did she get kidnapped by the reclusive fundamentalist family that lived next to the junkyard where Betsy liked to hang out? Does it have something to do with the intimidating county judge who lives in the old Victorian manse Anna has always called “the witch’s house,” or the mysterious lights in his cornfields? Complicating Anna’s investigation is the fact that her high school sweetheart is now a cop—and the statute of limitations on their feelings for one another hasn’t quite yet run out. Anna will have to decide who she can trust if she wants to solve this mystery, and if she chooses wrong, she might become a cold case of her own. Gillingham’s prose imbues the story with moody unease, turning the ordinary eerie in nearly every scene. The mystery more than delivers on the hook of its premise. Readers will anxiously await Anna’s future cases, whether they unfold in the eerie confines of Penn’s Point or elsewhere.
An artful and totally immersive cold-case mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781665777681
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Archway
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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