Exciting enough to be a page-turner, but can also be enjoyed slowly, like a delicious Swiss chocolate.
In Hays’ mystery novel, a woman who died 15 years ago after a fall from the cathedral tower in Bern’s Old City may not have leapt, but been pushed.
In the fourth book in the Linder and Donatelli Mystery series, a teenage boy races from the Bern cathedral after intentionally causing a glassworker to fall from a scaffold. As the teen shakes the scaffold, he yells, “Murderer, I hope you bust your head open.” The glassworker, Denis Kellenberger, is seriously injured. Denis grew up in a tiny apartment in the cathedral, where his grandparents served as tower guards. When he was 10, his friend Zora and her little brother Goran lived nearby. Supposedly, one night, Zora’s mother Katica Horvat entered the cathedral through the tower door, climbed the staircase, jumped from the tower, and died. The church sexton says Denis was to blame for her death because he left the tower door unlocked. In the hospital after his fall, Denis realizes the teen who shook the scaffold trying to kill him was Goran. Investigator Renzo Donatelli and Detective Giuliana Linder work the attempted murder case and question whether Katica truly committed suicide. The pair discovers nobody remembers much about the investigation, which “vanished” from police radar quickly. A B-story involves a potential mercy killing, but perhaps the book’s biggest buzz emanates from the heat between Renzo and Giuliana. Married Giuliana openly ogles the “preposterously beautiful,” almost-divorced Renzo as a man who “looked too mischievous to be an angel and not arrogant enough to be a model.” The author has lived in Switzerland for decades, so readers can expect vivid portraits of its locales. The narrative contains disturbing sexual violence, but also humor and rich descriptions, such as those referring to Guiliana’s husband’s “white-on-white” dinner: “White plates filled with cauliflower, rice, and chicken served with white wine.” The hardships of refugees—in this case, from Yugoslavia—provide added relevancy.
Exciting enough to be a page-turner, but can also be enjoyed slowly, like a delicious Swiss chocolate.Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781645060949
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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