A twisty, entertaining whodunit with sharp sleuthing and a lot of heart.
Private eye Dee Rommel returns to investigate an apparently murderous rich family in this knotty mystery series entry.
This second outing finds Dee working for 11-year-old Zar Sants-Mekler, who wants her to prove that his mother, Agnes Sants, a wealthy heir and astrologer, didn’t kill their gardener, who was found dead of a gunshot wound in their backyard. Complicating the case is Zar’s insistence that the crime be solved in just nine days so that he and Agnes can make their Thanksgiving flight to Vienna; complicating it further is Agnes’ statement to the Portland, Maine, police in which she confessed to the murder. Dee’s crusty boss, Gordy, wants to drop this turkey, but other developments make Dee question what seems an open-and-shut case: Unknown assailants viciously beat Zar’s father, Tobias Mekler, causing him to be put into an induced coma; an acquaintance of Gordy’s, involved in questionable real estate dealings with Mekler’s company, becomes part of the mystery; and Dee’s car is vandalized by two criminals who seem vaguely mixed up with the family. Dee delves into Agnes’ astrological community and is skeptical of its claims, but Agnes’ colleague does an astrological chart that has a weird prescience. The PI also gets a fix on the odd denizens of the Sants-Mekler household, including the frosty, secretive housekeeper, Dolba; Zar’s bullying teenage brother Fletcher; and his even crueler eldest brother, Toby Junior, a charismatic but menacing practitioner of Brazilian jujitsu who’s hell-bent on selling off Agnes’ heirlooms. As Dee sorts through this tangle, she weathers nightmarish flashbacks to the crime that caused her to lose the lower part of one leg and butts heads with Robbie Donato, the handsome police detective working the murder, with whom she had a brief romantic connection before he took up with the glamorous news anchor now carrying his child.
Selbo sets her yarn in an atmospheric panorama of Portland, where, hidden behind a quaint veneer, poverty is plain: “Ratty sofas weigh down broken porches. Beer and soda cans have gathered into thick piles against fractured curbs. Empty lots sport tall, brown weeds, most have trapped trash in their thorns.” Her prose is punchy and evocative, as when she describes the aftermath of Tobias’ assault, with “his bashed head splotched with coagulating globs of vital fluid.” The novel is also stocked with vivid, sharply drawn characters. Zar, in particular, is a compelling creation: a nerdy know-it-all—named after the soothsaying prophet of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra—who’s forever spouting trivia that often sounds inane (“Do you know what gout is? It’s when the joints in your body get full of too many crystals made of uric acid or something and you swell up and your big toe can hurt a lot”) but sometimes turns out to have subtler meaning. Dee herself is shown to be a complex, prickly hero living with disability and harboring a deep curiosity and empathy beneath a hard-bitten exterior. Readers will happily follow her down many rabbit holes.
A twisty, entertaining whodunit with sharp sleuthing and a lot of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950627-55-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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