An amusing cozy with quirky characters and a down-to-earth heroine with plenty of moxie.
A private eye doing her civic duty gets embroiled in several nasty cases.
Retired TV star Poppy Harmon was forced to go back into business when her cheating husband left her a penniless widow (Poppy Harmon Investigates, 2018). Drawing inspiration from Jack Colt, PI, the well-received show in which she starred with Rod Harper, she’s launched the Desert Flower Detective Agency, whose staff includes Poppy and her 60-ish sidekicks, pushy Iris and retiring Violet, whose 12-year-old grandson, Wyatt, is a talented hacker who helps them after school. Finding that three golden age females don’t inspire confidence among their target clientele, they’ve hired handsome aspiring actor Matt Cameron, aka Matt Flowers, who does a bang-up job pretending to be a detective. Poppy’s serving on the jury in the trial of famous crooner Tony Molina, who stands accused of assaulting celebrity chef Carmine Cicci over an overcooked steak. Elected as jury foreman, Poppy persuades all but one of the jurors to vote guilty in the open-and-shut case, but the last juror, a young man named Alden Kenny, refuses to budge, hanging the jury and fueling Poppy’s suspicions that Kenny was paid off. Those suspicions are left to simmer when Rod Harper, Poppy's former co-star, hires the agency to find his missing daughter, Lara, a wild child who vanished after an argument. Her credit card has been used nearby at several places in the Coachella Valley, but when Lara turns up, she claims to have been on a spiritual journey to Nepal. Poppy must also deal with Rod’s renewed interest in pursuing a relationship with her and her daughter Heather’s release from prison after an involuntary manslaughter charge. When juror Kenny calls begging for her help, she goes to his house and finds him dead in his pool, renewing her interest in Tony Molina. The cases turn out to be related in a number of surprising ways.
An amusing cozy with quirky characters and a down-to-earth heroine with plenty of moxie.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1391-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Too much psychobabble, technobabble, and envirobabble, yet the appeal of the young sleuths (smart, funny, tough) almost...
A cunning serial killer plays devilish mind games with his would-be captors—and what else is new?
Not much. Well, he does have this penchant for pluralizing. That is, he grabs his young women in pairs. Why pairs? He uses corpse one for the planting of clues sufficient to allow law enforcement—if law enforcement is astute enough—to find corpse two alive. “Eco-Killer,” he’s been tabbed because in addition to his passion for gamesmanship, he seems to have an ongoing love-hate relationship with the environment. From Georgia, scene of the first killings, we shift to Virginia, where Special Agent Mac McCormack of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been on the case from the outset. He’s been directed to Virginia by a barrage of enigmatic phone calls from someone who claims to know how the serial killer’s sly and twisted mind works. In Quantico, a training ground for FBI agents as well as for US Marines, Mac meets fledgling feebie Kimberly Quincy, daughter of former agent Pierce Quincy, famous throughout the service for his legendary exploits as a profiler. When the Eco-Killer strikes again, Quincy and his p.i. partner Lorraine Conner, mainstays of the series, (The Next Accident, 2001, etc.), are called in to consult, but the case really belongs to the captivating Kimberly and hunkish Mac (with their bods for sex and brains for high-powered detecting). Convinced there’s a chance to save a life if they can manage to solve the killer’s puzzle in time, the two desperately seek clues from botanists, biologists, entomologists, and a variety of other analysts. Something from here, something from there, and at last they can make the guess that plunges them deep into Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, where the game plays out to a fiery end.
Too much psychobabble, technobabble, and envirobabble, yet the appeal of the young sleuths (smart, funny, tough) almost saves the day.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-553-80252-6
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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