Step right up for a sometimes cliched, sometimes surprising murder mystery.
A freelance journalist’s latest assignment threatens to give new meaning to the word deadline when he comes upon a murder mystery with century-old roots.
New York reporter Fenn Cooper is desperate for a story with “a wow factor,” something his editor calls “grab-me-by-the-balls oomph.” His latest—interviews with sex workers about why they do what they do—did not cut it. “Your next story needs to hit the ball out of the park,” Cooper’s editor demands before assigning him a piece about the last vestige of the traditional three-ring circus: the one-ring traveling circus. Easy-peasy? Anything but. Meanwhile, in California, executive Marvin Brinks faces his own deadline desperation. He’s been embezzling from his Hollywood studio to finance his expensive lifestyle and obsession with acquiring fine art and rare books. The plot thickens when Brinks learns that Chinese bankrollers are interested in investing and will want a look at the studio’s finances—he has one week to cook the books. The storylines converge when Cooper meets a denizen of the midway with distant ties to Brinks’ studio and an old contract that threatens to expose Brinks’ crimes, prompting the executive to hire an assassin to find the contract and eliminate anyone connected to it. Kalfel introduces a problematic protagonist in Cooper, a commitment-phobe who is not above cheating on his latest girlfriend with the sex workers he’s profiling. A “charming bastard” is still a bastard, and this one has an off-putting predilection for socially inappropriate remarks. Once readers get past questions about why Cooper would spend hundreds of dollars of his own money on a spec story, or why he doesn’t try to sell it to another outlet when his editor turns it down, the plot kicks in with a vivid evocation of circus life and some finely etched characters, including a diminutive fortuneteller and a sideshow act with some serious baggage.
Step right up for a sometimes cliched, sometimes surprising murder mystery.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781639859009
Page Count: 526
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
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
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