A charming cozy with a touch of magic along with the expected recipes.
A mini-reunion of high school classmates doesn’t go off as planned.
Jin Bakery, the family establishment where Felicity Jin works, is next door to Love Blooms, her boyfriend Kelvin Love’s flower shop. So it’s convenient for Mrs. Robson, who owns a B&B in their small Central California town of Pixie, to ask Kelvin to provide an assortment of flowers to dress up the Pixie Inn and Felicity to provide lots of yummy Chinese pastries for the group of women whose arrival she expects the next day. Jin Bakery’s treats are extra special because they’re infused with a touch of magic. The woman organizing the get-together is Ashlyn Cook, known as Queen B, and the other three women—Eri, Wren, and Saige—all went to high school with her, although Felicity senses they were not and are not best friends by any means. Soon after Felicity is pressed into service as a tour guide for the squabbling group, Ashlyn is found dead in her tub, which has been enhanced with Yuhua stones that were left at the B&B anonymously as a gift for Ashlyn. Det. Rylan Sun, who has a rocky relationship with Felicity because of her previous meddling, is in charge of looking into Ashlyn's death, which turns out to have been no accident. Since Felicity’s almond cookies are a possible source of the allergic reaction that killed Ashlyn, she decides that she’d better do some sleuthing—over Sun’s objections. With the help of Kelvin, who has some magical powers of his own, and her magic rabbit, Whiskers, she turns up a number of alternate suspects.
A charming cozy with a touch of magic along with the expected recipes.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781250323279
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
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