Just the thing for readers who think Donna Andrews’ Virginia cozies could use a drop of Jane Austen.
A Jane Austen Murder Mystery week spawns an actual homicide. Who’d of thought it?
Bent on dissuading her aunt, Wendy Prescott, from selling the struggling Laurel Springs Inn, Prof. Phaedra Brighton, of Somerset University, hatches the idea of sponsoring a seven-day event that will attract Austen fans from across Virginia, assign them roles in a climactic staging of Persuasion, encourage them to dress in period costume and inhabit their characters during the run-up, and dole out clues as to which character is going to kill which. Phaedra’s carefully crafted plot is promptly upstaged by the unknown party who shoots overbearing Regency romance novelist Harriet Overton dead with an arrow. All the guests had ample opportunity to kill her, and most of them have motives. Her henpecked husband, Tom Overton, was a college archer before his marriage made him a worm ripe for turning. Harriet had trashed technical editor Felicity Penrose’s attempt to write a romance novel years ago. And she was pretty clearly blackmailing Rollo Barron, a Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist whose review of her latest, The Duplicitous Duke, morphed literally overnight from a pan to a paean. The killer, not content with hitting a single target, locks Phaedra in an uninhabited house’s coal cellar shortly after she rescues Victoria Sutton, the administrative assistant to real estate broker Brian Callahan, from the bottom of a well. The distraught heroine finds it hard to trust the motives of Brian, Wendy’s high school boyfriend, or Prof. Mark Selden, the British Shakespearean who’s uncomfortably attentive to her. The celebration ends up largely forgotten in the rush to identify the killer before the end of the week.
Just the thing for readers who think Donna Andrews’ Virginia cozies could use a drop of Jane Austen.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-33763-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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