A fast-paced, romantic supernatural puzzler, nestled in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
Easley’s novel offers romance, a ghost story, a mystery, a lost treasure map, and even some home renovations.
Recently divorced 35-year-old Kate Ecklund is finally pursuing her longtime dream of opening a bed-and-breakfast in the shadows of the Cascades. She left a financially comfortable but emotionally stifling existence as a member of Seattle high society to remodel a Victorian mansion in picturesque Salmon Falls, Washington, where she and her 8-year-old daughter can start a new life. Kate’s musician brother is living with her to help with the renovations and set up his own studio space. Before long, though, they’re unsettled by another musical roommate: the piano-playing ghost of Blossom Thatcher, the mansion’s recently deceased owner. As Kate learns more about Blossom’s tragic past and the puzzling history of her new abode, she gets to know her new neighbors, many of whom harbor secrets of their own. Easley plays two storylines against each other with occasional chapters that focus on the events of Blossom’s life, featuring characters and themes that echo stories set in the present. This ambitious blend of genres results in a tapas-style sampler of delightful morsels that will leave readers hungry for more, especially its wonderful treatment of issues related to ecology, social class, and gender in both time periods. Easley keeps an impressive number of plates spinning throughout and ultimately ends with all of them intact. The characters are well drawn and the pacing is brisk, but it’s the setting that’s the star of the show: Like Louise Penny’s Three Pines, Salmon Falls has a small-town charm, surrounded by natural beauty, that makes it easy to pass the time there.
A fast-paced, romantic supernatural puzzler, nestled in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9798991731003
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Ames Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2024
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: tomorrow
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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