An often humorous mystery replete with questionable decisions, fortunate coincidences, and opportunities for redemption.
A father and daughter team up to solve a murder.
With limited success as an adult actor, former child star Jarrod Jarvis has pursued writing and is currently rehearsing his new play, an Agatha Christie–inspired mystery. Following the untimely death of his husband, Charlie, a police detective who succumbed to cancer, Jarrod was left to raise their daughter, Olivia, whose choice of a criminal justice major in college was a tribute to Charlie. Jarrod’s savvy friend Kitty Reynolds, who encouraged him to pursue writing and directing—and who happens to be a former first lady of the United States—wants to set him up with her new Secret Service bodyguard, the exceptionally attractive Jim Stratton. Liv’s currently dating Zel Cameron, a documentary film student who urges her to find and meet her surrogate mother. Meanwhile, Liv’s best friend, Maude, develops romantic feelings for Zel’s charming assistant. Liv grows more concerned about the financial motives behind Zel’s actions when he reveals that he’s located the surrogate, Candy Lithwick. Candy is agreeable enough, but one of her two children harbors suspicions that Liv wants her mother’s property, and the other needs Jarrod’s assistance in promoting his career. Charlie’s brother Brody, a semifamous professional wrestler, arrives seeking refuge in Jarrod’s casita. When Zel fails to show up for a dinner where he was supposed to meet Jarrod, an annoyed Liv visits his studio and discovers his lifeless body. Unsatisfied with the police investigation, Jarrod, who’s dabbled in detection, embarks with Brody and Liv on his own investigation and learns that Zel’s habit of plagiarism made him widely disliked at school.
An often humorous mystery replete with questionable decisions, fortunate coincidences, and opportunities for redemption.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781496738929
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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