A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.
Farrow’s brutal take on the locked-room mystery presents a murder committed inside a secure group ward in the Joliette Institution for Women near Montreal in 1994.
Lady Jail doesn’t confine its residents in separate cells but parcels them out in group quarters, like the one in which eight women doing time together suddenly find their number abruptly reduced to seven. Someone has strangled Florence, who’s locked up for throwing acid in a rival’s face, in the group bathroom using a length of wire that's been smuggled in. The killer is clearly one of the other prisoners—senior inmate Doi, who attacked her daughter with a hatchet; Malka, the next oldest, who poisoned her husband; Temple, who smuggles guns for the mob; Rozlynn, who celebrated her 18th birthday by killing her father; Courtney, who stabbed her best friend to death when she caught her flirting; her inseparable pal, Jodi, who shot a man during her boyfriend’s convenience-store robbery; and newcomer Abigail, an embezzler who’s still hiding the millions she stole—unless it’s really correctional officer Isaure Dabrezil, who’s working at Lady Jail during her yearlong suspension from the Sûreté du Québec. The job of figuring out whodunit is given to DS Émile Cinq-Mars, of the Montreal Police Service fraud squad, because he arrested Abi and because Dabrezil’s presence would render any SQ investigation problematic. Farrow keeps the story’s development as intense as the claustrophobic setting until he’s ready to unleash a bravura, hyperextended denouement.
A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9073-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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