A serpentine, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing right to the final pages.
An interior designer becomes embroiled in the murder of her former best friend in Carlisle’s mystery novel.
The story begins with the murder of Elaine Reid by means of a six-inch butcher’s blade. Inebriated and confused, Reid’s former longtime best friend and interior design business partner, Catheryn “Cat” Clark, is found at the scene, covered in blood. Detectives zero in on the rock-solid motive: Elaine’s vicious betrayal of Cat involved an illicit affair with Cat’s husband, Tim. Elaine brought hotel receipts to Catheryn’s house on the night of the murder to arrogantly throw the evidence in Cat’s face. The burning question of Cat’s guilt looms over the remainder of the novel as Elaine’s ghost appears in Cat’s jail cell to tell her she isn’t responsible, despite her faulty memory and the circumstances of the killing damning her in the eyes of the law. Flashbacks detail Cat and Elaine’s friendship throughout college at North Carolina’s Green Valley University. Their group included the pushy, manipulative Elaine and her boyfriend, Evan, Cat and her partner, Tim, and Mia Davis, whose life was cut short by a shocking suicide. Questions linger about Mia’s demise even decades later—local police detective Rachel McGowen, who was also Mia’s classmate, reexamines the cold case, unconvinced it was a suicide as the jailed Cat recalls “how our entire group dynamic seemed to shift” after the tragedy. The scenes involving the longtime group of friends demonstrate Carlisle’s grasp of character development, which is key to keeping this mystery simmering. Complex and satisfying, the narrative features plenty of crisp detective spadework, unanswered questions, interpersonal melodrama, more dead bodies, and enough surprises to keep even seasoned mystery fans on their toes. As this is Carlisle’s first entry in a three-book series, readers will hotly anticipate where the author takes her characters next.
A serpentine, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing right to the final pages.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9798864108949
Page Count: 505
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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