Lackluster writing doesn’t derail this delightful murder mystery.
In this ghostly tale set during the Revolutionary War, two officers—one colonial and one French—search for a missing French paymaster.
In 1781, at the height of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army relies heavily on infusions of gold from their French ally. Consequently, the disappearance of French paymaster Rene Garneau is a grave matter—in his absence, regiments in Albany have gone weeks without pay. George Washington dispatches Gen. Philip Schuyler and Vicomte Charles Dumas to track him and the money he was conveying somewhere between the Connecticut valley and the border of New York. The pair travels to the Hosford Stand in Canton, a tavern, the last place he was known to visit, and encounters a strange cast of characters, each seemingly harboring secrets, and many, including the Stand’s owner, Duncan Case, in desperate need of funds. There are also those who are unabashedly loyal to the crown or bitterly resentful of the involuntary contributions collected for the war effort. In other words, many have reason to murder Garneau. LaBella weaves old legend into a murder mystery, one based on Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). Schuyler discovers that some believe Garneau was murdered and now vengefully haunts Canton, riding his horse like a spectral apparition. This is a light, intricate, and unpredictable tale; the mystery is more evocative of Agatha Christie than Irving. The layered characterization adds to the fun, with an especially memorable Dumas. He often behaves in the “manner of a fop,” displaying a lack of gravity that initially troubles Schuyler, but this turns out to be a crafty act that conceals his remarkable intelligence. Unfortunately, the prose can be clumsy (“But oh, what a malicious crew we may have here. Perhaps the shadows reveal their true natures, in a way the daylight would never do”). Despite that distraction, the novel remains thoroughly entertaining—somehow both creepy and lighthearted.
Lackluster writing doesn’t derail this delightful murder mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 203
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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