An entertaining yarn whose rickety plotting is redeemed by strong writing and shrewd insights.
A Portland, Maine, private eye delves into a case of sexual assault, contested parentage, and murder in Selbo’s mystery novel, one in a series.
In her fifth series outing, 30-year-old PI Dee Rommel, spry enough on her prosthetic leg to run the Boston Marathon, is hired by lawyer Wallace Walsh on behalf of his client, oil heiress Freya Cummings. Freya has a horrific secret: At the age of 13, she was raped and impregnated by an unseen perp during one of her father’s wild parties. She’s now been contacted by 19-year-old Brynne Dwane, who claims to be her daughter—an idea Freya rejects because her now-deceased father told her the baby died soon after delivery. The fragile Freya refuses to take a DNA test that would settle the question, and she tasks Dee and the besotted Walsh with finding other ways to discredit Brynne’s story, a mission that mainly requires Dee to snoop among the eccentrics orbiting the Cummings household. They include Freya’s 9-year-old son, Royson, who’s a prodigy at online computer games; Royson’s tutor, an urbane little person; the housekeeper, a stolid ex-nun; tech zillionaire Harold Polly, who’s fixated on theories about the importance of superior bloodlines; and Polly’s sullen right-hand man, Darrell. The plot thickens when two women who look uncannily like Brynne turn up murdered. Meanwhile, a series of ransomware attacks on Maine blood banks has led to blood shortages, postponed surgeries, and deaths. Dee copes with all of this while keeping up her sporadic affair with handsome Portland police detective Robbie Donato, who’s also investigating the murders of the two women; the couple are forever trying to worm information out of each other, which serves as a form of tense foreplay.
Selbo’s yarn continues her ongoing atmospheric portrait of Maine, a place full of flinty, salt-of-the-earth types who do their jobs, disdain the rich and fashionable, and stoically weather the state’s ever-present fogs and storms. Dee is the epitome of that spirit: She’s annoyed, inconvenienced, and occasionally imperiled by her missing leg but soldiers on without self-pity in scenes that vividly evoke amputee life: “Do not think of my half-leg swelling, or sweating, or pounding against the socket, do not slip on the slick road. Do not fall. Do not think of one of those graves opening and offering you a place to rest.” The narrative is overstaffed with characters who don’t always have much to do, and it’s studded with plot gaps that are all but inexplicable (Freya’s parents’ failure to get her an abortion and spare the 13-year-old the anguish of pregnancy and childbirth goes unexplained). Still, Selbo’s fictive world has a convincingly gritty, lived-in feel, and her punchy prose registers both stark trauma (“He grunted and farted and shuddered and gasped, his breath was foul, and he shuddered for many many seconds and his whole stinking weight fell on me,” Freya recalls of her assault) and subtle emotional currents (“I’ve noticed how she’s spoken softly so he had to lean closer to hear her. Has she perfected this manipulation? Or…is she genuinely needy and nervous and unquiet?”). The result is a page-turner with an appealing, down-to-earth protagonist.
An entertaining yarn whose rickety plotting is redeemed by strong writing and shrewd insights.Pub Date: July 17, 2026
ISBN: 9798999461858
Page Count: 330
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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