A fine period mystery with a surprising ending.
Two very different detectives take on the task of protecting the finishing school they attended before the Great War.
Edwina Davenport is surprised to receive a letter from Ermentrude DuPont, the head teacher at Miss DuPont’s Finishing School for Young Ladies, asking for help with an unspecified problem and suggesting that she attend an event for prospective students while pretending to investigate the school’s offerings for a young relative. Edwina and her adventurous friend Beryl Helliwell, who’d both attended the London school, run a detective agency and feel they can’t ignore the cry for help. Arriving at Miss DuPont's, which is already in dire financial straits, they discover that someone has been playing nasty tricks, stealing things, making odd noises at night, and causing quite a few of the girls to leave. The stern Miss Glover and their former schoolmate Mary White, the only other teachers, are supplemented by the butler and cook, who are husband and wife, along with the gardener and a new maid. The only other current visitors are another former classmate of Edwina and Beryl’s—Veronica DeLisle; Paul Deering, her second husband; and her very unhappy daughter, Florence Montrose. Veronica has changed all too little since her school days, when she was a horrible bully. So when Edwina finds her dead in the school grotto, she can’t help but suspect foul play. Veronica’s first husband, Desmond Montrose, was once Edwina’s crush. Now he runs Montrose Aeronautics, an airplane manufacturer. Her second husband seems completely under her thumb, but he could be one of a long list of people who might want her dead. The police seem to be writing off Veronica’s demise as an accident, but Edwina and Beryl disagree and set to work to find a killer.
A fine period mystery with a surprising ending.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781496740144
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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