An enjoyable beach read that speaks to timely issues.
In Perry’s ecologically minded mystery, the tranquility of a small Connecticut coastal town is disrupted when a local attorney discovers a corpse in a bookstore parking lot.
Thirty-something Jennifer “Jenn” Bowdoin is about to enter P.T. Jane’s bookstore to meet her sister-in-law, Claire, when she receives a phone call from her boss at the Shipward & Waters law firm. While walking back into the parking lot to answer it, she happens upon a dead body partially hidden behind a free-standing freezer. The next day she finds out that the man, Dr. Tilman, a herpetologist from Columbia University, was murdered; he’d been evaluating a property, Riverfront Landing, for Jenn’s law firm that was on the verge of being approved for development into a multiunit complex. The firm is handling legal work for the developer, but a local conservation group has been fighting to preserve the land, “the largest undeveloped tract of shoreline between New York and Boston.” Several days later, the body of environmental activist Dot Hutchinson is discovered; like Tilman, Dot was dispatched with a blow to the head by a blunt object. Haunted by the image of Tilman’s lifeless face, Jenn feels compelled to investigate the crimes on her own. Despite coming across less as a legal eagle than as a worker bee, she has a curiosity and persistence that result in the discovery of several significant clues, including the eggs of a possibly endangered salamander. Over the course of her debut novel, Perry, who has experience practicing environmental law, provides readers with plenty of intriguing environmental factoids as well as amusing social commentary. Jenn is a pleasantly quirky heroine who takes “tree hugging” to a whole new level: She’s poignantly named the two American chestnut trees on her property—the last two locally surviving members of their species—“Romeo” and “Juliet.” The author does have a tendency to unnecessarily explicate emotions that are otherwise clear from dialogue and action. However, she also offers plot twists, a diverse assortment of characters, and even a potential romance that propel the narrative toward an exciting denouement.
An enjoyable beach read that speaks to timely issues.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68-261907-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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: today
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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