Resonant 1968 memories, racist conspiracies, Zen-like mysticism, and the reliably off-kilter takes of the regulars. Perfect.
Think nothing could possibly make Cold Storage, Alaska, any goofier? Think again.
The summer of 1968 brings five new arrivals to the little fishing village. The first is a rash of burglaries—nothing too serious but more than a nuisance and well outside the competence of George Hanson, the Seattle cop who followed barkeeper Ellie Hobbes and boat keeper Slippery Wilson to Cold Storage and settled there as an unofficial lawman. The second is Brother Louis, a Trappist monk sent forth from Gethsemane, Kentucky, to dim the publicity his Cistercian monastery has gained from the books he’s published as Thomas Merton. The third is FBI agent, or maybe ex-agent, Boston Corbett, who’s traveled there to have a word with Brother Louis about his possible Communist sympathies. The fourth and fifth are George Atzerodt and Ed Spangler, a pair of racist agitators bent on recruiting equally weak-minded souls to their visionary cause and acquiring the Old General, a mummy Ellie grew up with back in the Haywood Saloon. Word on the streets is that the Old General’s remains are actually those of actor/assassin John Wilkes Booth, and the insurrectionists think they’d be an inspiration to the followers they hope to enlist. It’s hard for the Cold Storage natives to keep up with this many star-crossed arrivals, but Straley assigns a memorable role to Venus Myrtle, a 16-year-old who inspires mystical dreams in Brother Louis and straight-up lust in the sons of the Confederacy. Fans of this loopy series, licking their lips in anticipation of the ensuing complications, won’t expect everything to be tied up in a neat bundle, and it isn’t.
Resonant 1968 memories, racist conspiracies, Zen-like mysticism, and the reliably off-kilter takes of the regulars. Perfect.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29381-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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
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
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