An often compelling whodunit with strong characterization.
The murder of a starlet with a checkered past throws a small community into turmoil in Shapiro’s second mystery novel in the Wynter Island series.
As journalist Kate Thomas grabs her morning coffee, the first thing she hears is that TV star Rosalie Morgann is coming to town. Even more surprising to Kate is that Rosalie is actually Rose Morgan, a former Wynter Island, British Columbia, local who skipped town after having many affairs with married men. Rosalie wants to be interviewed on the local community television station CWYN, of which Kate is the manager. That request seems simple enough, but tragedy strikes when Rosalie suddenly dies on air, apparently poisoned by her own drink. Kate now turns sleuth, and every islander who had issues with Rose/Rosalie’s past behavior becomes a potential suspect. Shapiro does a great job of weaving together the many characters’ stories, and she gives them each distinct personalities; Kate describes the two town gossips at the story’s beginning thusly: “It would have been easy to place both of them in two white t-shirts with the words ‘Extrovert’ written on one and ‘Introvert’ written on the other.” She also pays careful attention to Indigenous characters living on the local Tsawout First Nation reserve, and she shows how such communities deal with entrenched racism, which adds an important dimension to the story. Occasionally, Kate is a frustrating protagonist; her investigation leads her to ask many questions and knock on many doors, but doing so makes her come across as an unlikable busybody at times. Some of her meditations are insightful, however, such as her reading of Rosalie’s character: “Forgiveness wasn’t necessarily her destination. Understanding her own failings and accepting responsibility for any harm she’d done was the point.” It’s this compassion that will compel readers to delve into the mystery alongside her.
An often compelling whodunit with strong characterization.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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