A buoyant, frolicsome whodunit anchored by an unassuming, supersleuthing duo.
In this mystery, the murder of a high school football coach spurs two amateur detectives back into action.
This third installment of former teacher Kaye’s Chalkboard Outlines series stars beloved veteran English instructor and “rabid pacifist” Emma Lovett and her fashion-conscious best friend, Leslie Parker. They are entering their third year at Western Colorado’s Thomas Jefferson High School. After enjoying a respite from investigating two murders that rocked Jefferson High, it’s not long before another body shows up just a month after the start of the new school year. This time, it’s one of Emma’s colleagues. Football coach and staunch sports fanatic Charlie Foreman (“Sports were—almost—his only reason for being”) is found strangled in a gymnasium office. Though Charlie happened to be the school superintendent’s son, he also was someone with an abrasive personality who frequently locked horns with the staff. But who would go to the extreme of murdering him? Leslie’s dating exploits with her boyfriend, Shawn, and her penchant for quoting Shakespeare throughout the book add touches of humor and whimsy to the weightier amateur investigation, which draws in suspects galore from across the school. They include students, promising athletes, twin brothers, and a Speedo-wearing trailer dweller as well as Leslie herself. As the mystery unfolds and Emma is threatened and then attacked at a party, it becomes clear that both Charlie’s private and professional lives had been vastly underestimated. The rather rushed reveal comes as a surprise after a Hamlet-style trap is set. Adding heft to the storyline are intriguing specifics surrounding Emma’s recent complaints of dizziness and foggy vision. When the cause is revealed after a meticulously detailed MRI, it’s a serious diagnosis. Emma’s trials with the same ailment that the author has grappled with afford readers a more intimate glimpse into the protagonist’s life and immensely humanize her beyond the quirky high school teacher–cum–amateur sleuth persona. With the tale’s swift plotting, hint of danger, and effortlessly clever, hip prose, Kaye again demonstrates how simple storytelling can translate into indulgently devilish fun even in the violence-prone murder mystery genre.
A buoyant, frolicsome whodunit anchored by an unassuming, supersleuthing duo.Pub Date: June 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1948051729
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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