A crime tale with an engaging setting and some intriguing characters that loses ground in the final stretch.
In Black’s mystery novel, a captivating horse sparks rivalries in the horse-racing world that have deadly consequences.
Natalie and Jeff Frazier have had some success as thoroughbred racehorse owners on their local California circuit. Natalie’s favorite horse, FraziersFury, or “Fury” for short, is their most exciting colt—one that has the potential to qualify for the coveted Million Dollar Derby. Other racing enthusiasts are interested in the horse, including Angie McCoy, a jockey who’s decided that Fury must be hers at any cost. Natalie resists the lucrative offers, unknowingly putting herself, her husband, and Fury’s dedicated handlers in danger. A series of unusual happenings occurs, including a break-in at the barn where Fury is kept, a kidnapping, and eventually, an unexpected murder. The Fury team find themselves drawn into the investigation, and members of their community reveal themselves as backstabbers and blackmailers. But who did the dirtiest of the dirty work—and how far will that person go to cover their tracks? Over the course of the novel, Black shows extensive expertise about racehorses and the world of those who love them, and her descriptions of Fury’s angulation and conditioning show the obsession with detail that drives thoroughbred enthusiasts. Among that group, Angie is the author’s most thrilling creation as someone who’s unafraid to use force to get what she wants, and she serves as an effective foil to the sweet-natured Natalie. However, when Angie is absent from the story, it turns into a more standard whodunit, and the book as a whole loses a great deal of momentum.
A crime tale with an engaging setting and some intriguing characters that loses ground in the final stretch.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-975790-12-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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