An entertaining whodunit that finds plenty of toxic rot in a seemingly wholesome setting.
Swiss detectives dig into the cutthroat world of organic farming in Hays’ twisty murder mystery series starter.
The city of Bern—Switzerland’s clean, orderly capital—has a rare moment of mayhem when a policeman named Jonas Pauli is accused of clubbing Simon Etter to death during a riot. Det. Giuliana Linder is assigned to investigate the incident and subtly pressured by police brass to find another culprit to take the heat off Jonas, who swears he hit Simon only once, lightly, and that the second, fatal blow must have been struck by someone else. Giuliana feels torn by the case: She’d like to exonerate Jonas, but she’s also primed to believe the worst because of her immersion in Bern’s counterculture as a student, her leftist journalist husband Ueli’s distrust of all police (except her, she hopes), and her 15-year-old daughter’s arrest for rioting on the night of the murder. Pauli’s story gains credence when Giuliana turns up evidence that Simon was a drug dealer who might have had enemies. But the case takes a swerve when Giuliana’s colleague Renzo Donatelli links it to the murder of an organic farmer named Frank Schwab, who was found beaten, smothered to death, and drenched in pesticide—a substance the doctrinaire Frank never allowed on his farm. The prime suspect is a suspicious young man known as Simu, who was often around Frank’s farm—and turns out to be someone connected to Giuliana’s other case. The plot thickens as Giuliana ties Simon to an Albanian drug kingpin and Renzo probes the harsh economics of organic farming. Meanwhile, Giuliana and the handsome Renzo struggle to fend off their intensifying desire for each other as their marriages fray.
This first installment of Hays’ Linder and Donatelli mystery series steeps readers in intricate procedural details, such as turning horrific photos of a dead victim’s bloated face into recognizable artist’s sketches; piecing together timelines to verify alibis; and even sussing out the niceties of organic certification and agricultural subsidies. Hays’ plotting is first-rate as she keeps the sleuthing believable and offers up earned revelations, which make sense of the clues even when they go in unexpected directions. Her punchy, evocative prose looks beneath Switzerland’s veneer of antiseptic quaintness to find grungy atmospherics, as in a description of an informant: “A piercing through the nasal septum reminded her of snot dangling from each nostril, and tattoos of thorny vines covered what she could see of his arms. Steel plugs had stretched his earlobes into gaping tunnels.” The author is equally good at painting the inner worlds of her characters, from overworked cops and worried parents to fog-brained criminals: “Christ, he was blitzed....The shots of schnapps—that’d been his mistake. Still, he’d managed; he’d managed everything. Things were set up the way he wanted them. And if he’d messed up somewhere…well, it could be fixed. Later.” The result is an engrossing page-turner.
An entertaining whodunit that finds plenty of toxic rot in a seemingly wholesome setting.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64506-046-8
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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