A brisk, smoothly written police procedural from an author engaged with contemporary social issues.
A suspected hate crime divides a town and embroils two investigators in Hays’ novel.
This Switzerland-set mystery novel, the third in the author’s Polizei Bern series, begins with the violent and tragic death of Andi Eberhart, 33, who’s struck by a car and killed while riding her bicycle home through the icy streets of Bern. The hit-and-run aspect of the death devastates her Sri Lankan partner, Nisha; she immediately suspects foul play, revealing to investigators that the couple and their newborn daughter, Saritha, had been terrorized by a relentless barrage of anonymous homophobic letters sent to their home. When the event is recategorized as a homicide, detective duo Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli ramp up their investigation as a list of suspects begins to fall into place. Someone in Nisha’s Tamil family, stridently opposed to her queer lifestyle, could possibly be responsible—most notably her brother, Mathan, who’s been texting her with shaming messages. Various others might have wanted to cause Andi harm, too: Perhaps the murder could be connected to her job counseling soldiers, or retribution for her reporting racist, bullying guards at the courthouse where a client worked. As the details of Andi’s personal life, in addition to her forthright personality and outspoken temperament, become more lucid, Giuliana and Renzo’s job of ferreting out a killer grows more difficult amid an ever expanding group of suspects and plausible leads (“She always hated people who said one thing and meant another. Our girl always spoke her mind, didn’t she, dear?”). With the duo’s powers of deduction once again on impressive display, this third outing is a fine addition to the series, with Hays remaining consistently focused on current affairs, international cultures, and hot topics. The author puts LGBTQ+ parenting trends, hate crimes, and homophobia center stage in an investigation that brings heat to these issues and leads to a rousing resolution.
A brisk, smoothly written police procedural from an author engaged with contemporary social issues.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781645060833
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
