An entertaining if anticlimactic murder mystery.
A psychologist’s suspicions grow after someone murders a colleague and signs point to wrongdoings at her workplace.
Mikelena Pearson, a Bay Area psychologist, has some problems at work. TWF Healthcare seems more devoted to cutting costs than to patient health. But Mik is content until a rash of suicides of former patients makes her uneasy, as do reports by some young patients of disturbingly real dreams. After the chief of TWF’s psychiatry department dies from a bizarre stabbing, the psychologist receives a mysterious email message that prompts her to investigate further. Through department meetings, patient sessions and talking with colleagues, she pieces together more of the truth, with her brother Erik and a handsome police liaison, Luke Sustern, as sounding boards. Her professional skills come in handy: “My clinical awareness was heightened and my mind was running in therapist mode, searching for the real story….I felt like someone trying to crack a safe, listening intently while the dial turns, waiting for each click of each correct number, so that the tumblers all fall in place and I can open it and find out what is really inside.” Mik isn’t all business, though. She likes “hot, sweaty, passionate sex with the edge that comes from knowing others can see you and with the possibility of being caught.” Dixen ably portrays the health care industry with its bureaucracy, ass kissing and meetings held “to arrive at the conclusions that had been created by upper management prior to the meeting,” while convincing the reader of Mik’s genuine concern for her patients. Dixen has some fresh ideas here—such as an unusual kink involved in the murder case—and a punchy, brisk writing style to go with it (sometimes too reliant on choppy sentence fragments for tone). However, in the end, the solution appears to Mikelena in such a simple, straightforward way that it lacks much suspense or danger. It feels as though there should be more to the story, not least since Mik, even though she narrates the book, is hard to get to know.
An entertaining if anticlimactic murder mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1300002840
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
