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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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