Once Bude’s franchise hero arrives, the elaborately facetious but essentially toothless satire of the first half gives way...
Bude, the pen name of Ernest Carpenter Elmore (1901-57), juices this 1947 cozy by spending more than half the story setting the stage for a double murder whose victims are both active in a fantastical cult that’s taken root in the English village of Welworth.
The two powers behind the Children of Osiris, popularly known by the acronym Coo, are Eustace Mildmann, a widowed ex-bookseller whose fascination with early Egyptian religion launched Cooism, and Alicia Hagge-Smith, the wealthy widow whose capacious purse has installed Eustace as High Prophet and turned Cooism into a veritable cash machine. Despite their closeness, they don’t see eye to eye about everything. Eustace doesn’t share Mrs. Hagge-Smith’s infatuation with Peta Penpeti, whose assiduous devotion to the cult has made him Eustace’s successor-designate. And he’s slow to warm to his backer’s enthusiastic suggestion that they organize a conference that ends up drawing 600 of the faithful to Welworth, where they sleep in tents and talk a lot of rubbish Bude (The Lake District Murder, 2016, etc.) is too solicitous to let his readers overhear. Instead, he focuses on rivalries among the tight cliques that form around Penelope Parker, the Penpeti booster Eustace hopelessly adores; Hansford Boot, the Eustace booster who’s being blackmailed over some shameful secret in his past; and Denise Blake, Mrs. Hagge-Smith’s secretary, whom Eustace’s son, Terence, would love to marry despite his father’s sputtering objections. The nonfatal shooting of Sidney Arkwright, the under-chauffeur Mrs. Hagge-Smith has assigned Eustace, is only a prelude to a double poisoning that brings Inspector Meredith down from Scotland Yard to solve a case whose mysteries seem to multiply faster than rabbits.
Once Bude’s franchise hero arrives, the elaborately facetious but essentially toothless satire of the first half gives way to the head-scratching complications of the second. Pick your poison: although neither kind of pleasure is sustained all the way through, they’re both amply in evidence.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 1-4642-0902-2
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
© 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.
