Socialites and gangsters mix in this riotous mystery filled with dead ends and dead characters.
In 1921 Philadelphia, a series of poisonings gives a new detective her first puzzling case.
After having been shot while trying to catch a killer, Dr. Gilbert Lawless is back at the Philadelphia Morgue, where he and his partner, Dr. Marco Salvatore, are called to assist Det. Finnegan Pyle in his investigation into the death of Homer O’Hara. Pyle is there because O’Hara worked for gangster Tommy Fletcher, and Gil, Finn, and Tommy were childhood friends. But Gil has a different life now. He married a society woman who was shunned by her family for wedding an Irishman. Her death left him to care for their daughter even though he has shell shock from his service in World War I. When he stops for ice cream at Reading Terminal Market, a man dies at his feet. Like O’Hara, the man was poisoned with cyanide. Meanwhile, socialite Edie Shippen has set herself up as a private detective. Her assistant is Gil’s sister, Lizzie, and her first client is a woman who accuses Lily O’Hara of murdering her husband. Although Gil and Edie love each other, Gil refuses to tell her anything. But Edie has ways of getting information. Edie and Gil attend a fancy party where Gil meets Edie’s friend Ava Sylvester, an actress currently playing Juliet opposite Duncan Carroll, who looks very much like Gil. Edie and Lizzie are visiting Norwood Studios when Duncan also dies from poison. A reluctant Gil takes his place to finish up the remaining scenes. Because Pyle suspects Ava, a reckless Edie goes all out to find the truth.
Socialites and gangsters mix in this riotous mystery filled with dead ends and dead characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798892420389
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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