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
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
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