Mean girls, stalkers, and a jealous brother are all fair game as suspects in this clever and amusing mystery.
A rehearsal dinner goes badly awry when the groom is not only absent, but dead.
Athena Spencer left a bad marriage to return to the bosom of her large Greek family. She works at their garden center and helps out in the family restaurant along with her three sisters, Delphi, Maia, and Selene. Wealthy Mandy Black, who’s about to marry personal trainer Brady Rogers, is waiting for him at the restaurant, where they've booked their rehearsal dinner. After he doesn’t show up, his friends find him stabbed with a pair of scissors Selene uses at the hair salon where she works. Selene had reported Brady when he hit on her at the gym, but when Mandy accuses her of having had an affair with Brady, she becomes the prime suspect. Although the bridal party was visiting the salon when the scissors vanished, the evidence piling up against Selene forces Athena to investigate. At the same time, Athena’s working out relationship problems with handsome, astute Case Donnelly, whom she saved from a murder rap in her debut, Statue of Limitations (2020). Although Case has recently moved to Michigan, Athena, who has trust issues, isn't sure if that was for her or for some other reason. But she’s glad he’s willing to pitch in to help her save Selene. Now they just have to find someone who was fed up with Brady’s playboy habits.
Mean girls, stalkers, and a jealous brother are all fair game as suspects in this clever and amusing mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2435-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Apart from recurring characters, this entry is less interested in live people than in dead animals.
Dr. Temperance Brennan tackles the case of a serial killer of animals who’s been ascending the food chain over a period of years.
The unnerving vision that causes an elderly woman to drive off a rainy road in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, turns out to be a painted head nailed to a tree. Even more disquieting than this discovery is Tempe’s realization that it’s only the latest of a series of heads similarly disfigured, decorated, and displayed as death’s heads. The only thing that prevents the perp, whoever it is, from being threatened with life imprisonment is that none of the remains are human: They’re all skulls of rats, squirrels, rabbits, skunks, and dogs, the earliest of them three years old. Tempe and Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, the surly retired police investigator who partners with her, suspect that the killer, whose latest display does contain some human bones, is working up to killing people, and they turn out to be all too correct. Just in case Tempe is looking for relief from this stressful case at home, her willful 17-year-old grandniece, Ruthie, has overcome her resistance to setting foot on the campus of UNC Charlotte and made contact with Lester Meloy, a grad student who’s supplied her with weed, and Danielle Hall, his fellow member in a secretive group called “Live.” Ruthie inevitably goes missing and Tempe is kidnapped herself before all the promising complications of the case are waved aside in favor of a solution that comes out of left field and answers almost none of the sharpest questions the mystery has raised.
Apart from recurring characters, this entry is less interested in live people than in dead animals.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668051474
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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