First-rate Hess: crackling dialogue, winning characters, and an ingenious puzzle.
Perennially put-upon bookseller Claire Malloy (A Holly, Jolly Murder, 1999, etc.) is marching to an assertive new beat these days. She may have been impoverished by the untimely demise of her philandering husband Carlton, frustrated beyond belief at the adolescent angst of her daughter Caron, betrayed by her boyfriend Peter, and left in the lurch by convention chair Sally Fromberger, who’s had the bad grace to be hospitalized with deep venal thrombosis on the eve of Farberville College’s “Murder Comes to Campus” conference. But Claire refuses to play nursemaid to the four quarrelsome authors—Laureen Parks (gothic novels), Sherry Lynne Blackstone (cat detectives), Walter Dahl, (psychological thrillers), and Dilys Knoxwood (cozies)—who arrive for the festivities along with sweet-as-pie bestseller Alexandra Cruzetti and her editor, Roxanne Small. Instead, she presses Caron and her best friend Inez into taxi duty; browbeats Lily Twiller, proprietor of the environmentally correct Azalea Inn into allowing Laureen to smoke in her room; wrangles Sherry Lynne’s feline traveling companion Wimple onto her sun-porch; and tirelessly exhorts the authors to quit bickering and get on with the show. She even succeeds in getting the pregnant, truculent English department secretary to let her leave several cartons of to-be-autographed books in the lecture hall. Getting them out, however, turns into a problem when Arnie Riggles, weekend custodian, turns up cold-cocked in the Azalea Inn’s cistern, along with a very dead Roxanne Small, sending Claire into an immediate heads-on with ex-beau Peter, Farberville’s chief of police.
First-rate Hess: crackling dialogue, winning characters, and an ingenious puzzle.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24662-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.
Three familiar sleuths each get a turn in this trio of cozy Christmas mysteries.
First, O’Connor (Murder in Galway, 2019, etc.) dives into Siobhán O’Sullivan’s past. Just graduated from the Garda College and not due to report for duty until the New Year, she’s busy preparing for Christmas when she sees a sign advertising a missing dog and links the disappearance to that of her own family dog and others around town. When the town Santy, Paddy O’Shea, is discovered floating dead in a dunk tank he’s filled with hot chocolate, all the missing dogs are also found, waiting in vain to be part of his extravagant show. Now Siobhán must help catch Santy's killer. Next up, Day (Strangled Eggs and Ham, 2019, etc.) presents South Lick, Indiana, cafe/country store owner Robbie Jordan, whose boyfriend Abe’s father, Howard O’Neill, has secretly acquired Cocoa, a rescued Lab puppy, as a Christmas gift for Abe’s son, Sean. When Howard’s business associate, Jed Greenberg, is found dead on an icy sidewalk, tangled in Cocoa’s leash, it turns out to be murder. Though Jed had plenty of enemies, Howard is a particularly choice suspect because he’d just learned that Jed had cheated him in a business deal. In the final tale, Erickson (Death by Café Mocha, 2019, etc.) features cafe/bookstore owner Krissy Hancock, a locally renowned sleuth who reluctantly accompanies her friend Rita Jablonski to a remote warehouse, where Lewis Coates, whose attention to detail is obsessive, has installed an escape room. Each member of the small group is given their own room whose door code they must determine from cryptic clues. They all manage to escape to a large locked room where they find the corpse of Coates. A prick Krissy finds on his finger and traces to a trick mug strongly suggests that one of the players is also a killer.
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2360-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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