A convoluted mystery full of useful party tips, yummy recipes, and hidden secrets galore.
A talented hostess entertains a group of friends and relatives. Is one of them a murderer?
Eight people are visiting Sophie Winston’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, over the July Fourth holiday. They include her parents, Paul and Inga Bauer; her sister, Hannah Bauer; Aunt Melly Eberle and her new husband, Gus; Gus’ friend, Stan Cox, who’s staying elsewhere; and two family friends, Roscoe O’Brien and Cyril Chevalier. Walking their dogs, Sophie and her best friend, Nina Reid Norwood, spot Gus sneaking from the yard of neighbor Dollie Peabody, boding ill for Melly’s marriage. Dollie arrives at breakfast time seeking Sophie, who’s solved many murders, to announce she’s found a dead man in her house. Sophie calls her friend, police officer Wong, who thinks Dollie’s imagining things but agrees to check it out. The house is beautiful, but there’s no body. Melly’s already having second thoughts about her hasty marriage even before an 1820s–themed party where Gus picks a fight with her brother, Paul, claiming he’s trying to come between Gus and Melly. The party guests all receive copies of the Declaration of Independence as favors. Back at Dollie’s house, the police have discovered an actual corpse, that of Tony Fontana, who’d been hired by Sophie as a tour guide for her guests. After Sophie’s ex-boyfriend, Detective Wolf Fleishman, arrests Paul when his DNA is found on the body, he’s kicked off the case for being too close to the family, and his replacement doesn’t bother looking for another suspect. Melly kicks Gus out after she learns he’s been stealing from her, but he’s just one of the people Sophie must investigate in order to clear her father’s name.
A convoluted mystery full of useful party tips, yummy recipes, and hidden secrets galore.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781496743480
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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