An involving whodunit with strong characters who must find a way to work together.
The investigation of a mysterious accident puts a fragile friendship at risk in Millman’s thriller.
In this third installment of the Queen City Crimes series, Det. Ebony Jones is assigned to the case of a man who disappeared after a severe storm popped up while he was kayaking on the Hudson River. The identity of the missing kayaker comes as a blow to Ebony—he’s Kyle Emory, the ex-boyfriend of Ebony’s estranged best friend, attorney Jessie Martin, and the father of Jessie’s daughter, Lily. Ebony has to deliver another shock to Jessie, now reunited with her true love, Judge Hal Samuels: Kyle was engaged to Olivia Vargas, a much-younger social media influencer. Ebony first has to confirm whether Kyle is missing or dead; if he’s dead, she must determine whether his death was an accident, a suicide, or murder. If Kyle is a homicide victim, Ebony will have no shortage of suspects, including Olivia, who’s now entitled to half of Kyle’s life insurance payment; Olivia’s debt-ridden brother, Auggie; and Olivia’s current husband, Raul Esperanza, whom she hasn’t yet divorced. Ebony’s investigation is complicated by her fractured relationship with Jessie and by Jessie’s insistence on conducting her own off-the-books inquiry. The author impressively juggles several viewpoints (including those of Ebony, Jessie, and new district attorney Cindie Tarrico) of the same complex case. She also deftly illustrates the fraught political landscape that the police must navigate when dealing with the wealthy Vargas family (“Carlos Vargas’ words contained the undertone of a command rather than a request, and it was apparent he was used to controlling the situation”) and vividly conveys the breakneck pace of the investigation. Millman creates relatable, flawed characters: There’s Ebony, who is so tentative about reaching toward the future, both in her work and her personal life, and Jessie, who should be looking forward to a future with Hal but instead wallows in her past with Kyle. The tension between the two former close friends effectively raises the stakes of the narrative.
An involving whodunit with strong characters who must find a way to work together.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9781685122874
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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