A flawed but undeniably fun mystery showing retirement is anything but dull.
Three retired friends return to sleuthing when a murder hits close to home in this mystery.
Following Wade’s previous outing in his Indie Retirement series, Deadly Declarations (2022), a trio of friends—Harriet Keaton, Yeager Alexander, and retired lawyer Craig Travail—at the Indie Retirement Community of Charlotte, North Carolina, have a new troubling mystery to solve. Harriet came home to find her kitchen destroyed, the body of the man who sent her brother to prison 20 years ago, who’s been both shot and stabbed, and her brother insisting he has no idea what happened or where the historic gold coins on the floor came from. Similar coins also make an appearance at the Indie when residents start investing in local historic gold. At the same time, the wealthy Standish family takes over the Indie board and implements new procedures to extract money from residents. Hoping to grow closer to Harriet and help his friends, Craig comes out of retirement as a lawyer and the trio starts investigating the different cases affecting their community. Meanwhile, Craig’s nemesis, Robert Elkin, has returned to town and may be tinkering with Indie’s finances, leaving Craig to wonder “how he could have been so wrong to believe retirement living would ever be boring or lonely.” Wade’s leads are each fun and charming. Craig has an endearingly youthful crush on Harriet, who’s a force to be reckoned with, and Yeager provides consistent comic relief. (His turn as a fake lawyer defending public nudity against new management is a particular standout.) The different threads come together with some satisfying surprises that smartly build on real-world concerns of elder fraud. Wade has a tendency for clunky exposition, however, and the sudden jump in time and tone midway through (shifting the story to a courtroom drama) dilutes the charm of watching our amateur detectives contend with Indie’s kooky residents. Still, mystery fans who love Richard Osman’s cozy Thursday Murder Club books will enjoy the similarly energetic take on mystery-loving retirees.
A flawed but undeniably fun mystery showing retirement is anything but dull.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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