An exceedingly intelligent private-eye tale that offers a peek into the darker corners of art-world commerce.
In Witham’s latest mystery in a series, private investigator Julian Peale looks into the mysterious death of a rising young artist and discovers a web of criminal conspiracy.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Colleen Mason is shocked when she discovers that her estranged older brother, Sam, a 28-year-old painter, had died suddenly due to an overdose,according to authorities. She’s also astonished to learn that he is widely considered to have been a creative genius, and that many art dealers are eager to locate his work, which seems to have simply vanished. Colleen refuses to believe that Sam died by accident, or by suicide; in fact, she’s sure that he was murdered, and she hires Julian, a PI with a specialty in art crimes, to dig deeper. He soon learns that Sam was promoted by Curator Services, a dubious outfit that runs “vanity operations” for artists, manufacturing public impressions that their works are in great demand—a “borderline criminal” scheme of Victor Kamin and Max Dunnaway, who have ties to Albanian organized crime. Monica Smithton, a Boston-based art dealer looking for Sam’s work, has similar ties, although she labors to keep them concealed. In this enthralling whodunit, Witham takes the reader on a gripping tour of the “shifty parts of the art world.” As Trisha Donnally, the talent scout who originally found Sam, puts it: “I guess I knew there were two sides, or many sides, to the art world, one dark and one light.” The novel adeptly creates an atmosphere of violent menace in which a young, idealist painter with openminded beliefs—Sam was fascinated by the occult and “a mysterious beyond that influences creativity”—falls prey to cynical jackals. The plot is complex but never convoluted, and for all its intelligence and nuance, it moves at an entertainingly brisk pace. Overall, it’s a delightful, thoughtful, and quietly powerful read for anyone who loves art and crime dramas.
An exceedingly intelligent private-eye tale that offers a peek into the darker corners of art-world commerce.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781665772600
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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