A smart, well-paced, and cozy mystery with a large cast of lovable characters and a satisfying conclusion.
In Bennett’s novel, a determined reporter helps a friend honor her deceased mother’s wishes and uncovers a slew of hometown secrets in the process.
In the second installment of the author’s Heartland to Hometown Mystery series, the elderly Muriel Banks is found dead at the bottom of an embankment near Lewisburg Cemetery—the neglected Black cemetery in Benford County, Missouri that she had been attempting to preserve for historical purposes: “Most people driving past had no idea that the copse of beech and hickory trees beside the road marked the final resting place of the ancestors of several Black families.” Reporter Leni Spencer agrees to help her friend Elizabeth, Muriel’s grieving daughter, finish what Muriel had started and get the Lewisburg Cemetery registered as a historic site to protect it from both rumored rezoning and the town’s calculating mayor, Coralee Coleman. But tracing the path of Muriel’s research takes Leni and Elizabeth on a winding historical journey that reveals shocking truths, including hidden relatives and a missing will from a relative of Thomas Jefferson. The pair soon discovers that sleuthing comes at a cost as their discoveries threaten to tear their peaceful community apart. Bennett crafts a mystery that balances genuine tension with enough comfy details to reassure readers that nothing too bad will happen (a feeling that is surely helped by the text’s repeated references to the town’s breathtaking autumnal beauty). The pace remains pleasantly brisk, despite occasional typos and some lengthy asides that are meant to flesh out the historical context for Elizabeth’s family research (the largely natural dialogue helps make those asides both believable and informative). Bennett infuses a traditional whodunit with deeper themes, including racial prejudice, historical preservation, and retroactive justice. This somewhat unusual combination results in an exciting and thoughtful read that will likely please both mystery lovers and historical-fiction buffs.
A smart, well-paced, and cozy mystery with a large cast of lovable characters and a satisfying conclusion.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9798823056403
Page Count: 400
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2025
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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