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
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
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