A wonderfully weird mystery.
Detective Luella van Horn is back, and this time she’s investigating a murder on a private island.
Marie Jones may have recently solved a murder case on the reality show Sex Island as her “sexy alter ego” Luella van Horn, but now she’s back in New York City. Broke, alone, and stuck in midtown Manhattan in the August heat, she’s moving out of an apartment she can’t afford and desperate for a break. But then she gets a case—a man named Mark Fontaine wants Luella to prove that his wife, Caitlin, is having an affair. And so Marie transforms into Luella again, complete with a blonde wig (no fake teeth needed this time, since she got veneers with the money she earned from her last case), and travels to Murder Island, a private island off the coast of New York City. Owned by a few ultrarich families, the island is mostly isolated, with just one ferry a day. Luella poses as Mark’s cousin and tries to befriend Caitlin in hopes she’ll let something slip—but then the man Luella suspects of being Caitlin’s secret lover is found dead. Luella doesn’t know who she can trust on an island full of eccentric billionaires. She finds herself drawn into their dysfunction and discovers a secret (and very weird) underground sex cult, way too much smooth jazz, and people who may not be what they seem. Firestone creates a wild, wacky world for Luella that’s somehow even funnier than the one in her first book, Murder on Sex Island (2025). Although Luella is delightfully strange on her own, the story gets even more enjoyable when she joins up with a ragtag group of new crime-solving friends, including a raunchy ferry captain and a determined librarian. The world of the wealthy island elite creates a perfectly over-the-top backdrop upon which Luella can unleash her unique brand of detective work. Let’s hope there’s a third Luella adventure coming soon.
A wonderfully weird mystery.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091478
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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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