An engaging crime tale with four appealing sleuths.
This third installment of a series offers a mystery that resembles a game of Clue and relies strongly on cryptology—and a veritable school of red herrings.
Clarence Tyme, head of the library at Bellevue University, has been found dead after a fire. Accidental, say the police—but was it in fact murder? Precocious 10-year-old Irene “Reen” Penterson, who calls herself an investigative reporter, and her 9-year-old cousin, Joanie, don’t think Tyme’s death was an accident. Neither do two adults who happen to be amateur sleuths—Kathryn Frasier and her sister, Cece Goldman—after listening to the doubts of the Rev. Jim Whitefield. It all has to do with very cryptic messages left in the university chapel’s prayer box, short notes that quote Scripture and end with the admonition “God Remembers.” So the game is afoot. Who has a motive, and what secrets are hidden? Many faculty members are suspected. Also notable is that the ill-regarded head of the computer science department was run off the road on his bicycle and very seriously injured. Is there a pattern here? If this book has a target audience, it might be Christian cryptologists. Code-breaking has a lot to do with the story, and the tale is decidedly in favor of religion. In one scene, a nasty faculty member argues from what is clearly the position of a hubristic, agnostic academic, and readers will know what side they are supposed to root for—just one instance of heavy-handed preaching. Still, DiBianca’s motif of time, clocks, and watches—evident in her previous novels—is a superb gimmick, and the idea of two teams of smart female detectives working almost in parallel is equally clever. But many questions remain. For example, is the very qualified (and angry) professor Andrew Bellinger being denied tenure just so that he might be a suspect? And does he really think that an instance of cheating back when he was an undergraduate might get him fired? Bellinger is the most notable example of a red herring.
An engaging crime tale with four appealing sleuths.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73578-882-1
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Wordstar Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
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