A fun, madcap story about a librarian, a dead body, and a man named Dogbox in a unique Kiwi village.
A harried librarian on a New Zealand island deals with toddlers, pub quizzes, and a father-in-law accused of murder in Kany’s novel.
Maudie is living in paradise with her husband, a fisherman named Vil. They’re on New Zealand’s Stewart Island (Rakiura is the island’s traditional name); most of it is a national park, but somehow 400 or so people have eked out a life there. Maudie is originally from the U.S., but her life is now completely steeped in the pace of New Zealand. She’s busy with her job at the library, her toddlers, her to-do list, and the quizzes held at the island’s only pisser (that’s the pub). Personal crises big and small come and go, but Maudie’s frenzied life keeps moving along. The status quo is upended one day when a dead body is found at the wharf; the victim has a due date imprinted on his head. (“Like, someone used the library date stamper on his forehead,” Maudie’s husband tells her.) As messages accumulate on her phone (“shit kicking off massively outside pie cart”; “omg dead body on wharf”), Maudie learns that Vil’s father, Dogbox, has been arrested for the crime. She visits outside the jail window and starts an informal prison book club with him, discussing Gilgamesh translations as she tries to think of a way to clear his name. Kany’s novel contemplates life’s absurdities and temporary disasters in an appealing way that remains positive no matter the latest crisis. Maudie’s entertaining thought process moves slightly faster than the norm, and the novel deftly captures the way life can feel expansive and full even in a tiny community. Local lingo and Māori words pepper the story, which is set in a real-life paradise. Maudie seeks answers to deep questions—she may not ever find the keys to the universe, but she does endearingly strive to make sense of everything, for the sake of herself and those around her.
A fun, madcap story about a librarian, a dead body, and a man named Dogbox in a unique Kiwi village.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798277534649
Page Count: 303
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.
Penny, who’s never met a story idea big enough to daunt her, unspools the endless puzzles surrounding a corpse whose identity isn’t known but whose status as a murder victim is clear.
“There’s a body in Lost Nation,” a dead-of-night telephone call informs Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide division at the Sûreté du Québec. Why is the informant calling Gamache’s personal line, and how did they get his number? For that matter, who placed the call? It certainly wasn’t Clara Morrow, the Gamaches’ neighbor and friend, whose phone seems to have been used by someone who visited her home. And where is Lost Nation? This last question, at least, yields an answer: It’s an Indigenous burial ground that’s been overgrown with trees and, more recently, a corpse too badly decomposed to be readily identified. An autopsy reveals that the victim was beaten to death. In the absence of further clues to his identity, Gamache and his colleagues focus on May 29, 1914, the date engraved on the otherwise unreadable headstone over the gravesite where the body was found. The trail to the killer leads back to a 1967 interview genealogist Jeannette Bouchard conducted with local historian Flossy Fuller the day before they were both killed in a car crash, and still further back to the real-life sinking of the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner as unfamiliar to Penny’s characters as it will be to most of her readers. Even after Gamache has arrested the responsible parties, the biggest riddle remains: the secret of the balefully ugly plant known as Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412607
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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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