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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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