Like its own creepy backstory, the hero’s 86-year-old debut has now become a treasured chapter in criminal history.
Sir Henry Merrivale, everyone’s favorite blustering detective, returns in this reprint of his first appearance, originally published under the gossamer-thin pseudonym Carter Dickson in 1934.
After his introduction on the first page, H.M. has to wait for over half the story before he’s allowed onstage. In the meantime, all manner of alarums and excursions have broken out around Plague Court, the home of hangman’s assistant Louis Playge, who’s been reputed to haunt the place for more than 200 years. The estate’s latest owner, Lady Anne Benning, determined to exorcise the malign spirit, brings in psychic Roger Darworth and his half-wit medium, assistant, and frontman, Joseph Dennis, to push Louis Playge out for good. As Lady Benning; her nephew, Dean Halliday; his fiancee, Marion Latimer; and her brother, Ted Latimer, form a circle with Joseph, DI Humphrey Masters, and narrator and Dean’s old friend Ken Blake, Darworth locks himself in a stone building that’s padlocked in turn from outside and is promptly stabbed to death by Playge’s dagger in one of the earliest impossible crimes favored by Carr. The logistics of this one strain credulity, and the revelation of an accomplice who literally helps the killer get away with murder is a shade too convenient. But the post-17th-century atmosphere in the first half of the tale is thick enough to cut with a dagger, and fans with long memories will cheer the arrival of the aggressively no-nonsense H.M., who pauses just long enough between complaints and imprecations to unlock the mystery.
Like its own creepy backstory, the hero’s 86-year-old debut has now become a treasured chapter in criminal history.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61316-196-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: American Mystery Classics
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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