A knotted and frequently engaging tale of deception and family secrets.
In Orr’s mystery, a very wealthy man is nearly killed one night in the hospital, and he can’t shake the feeling that someone in his affluent, influential family is responsible.
After his brush with death, Charlie Cantling hires Benjamin Gould, an agent of the powerful Byrne and Company, to investigate what happened and uncover the truth. The Goulds, it turns out, have a long history with the Cantlings; Benjamin spent summers at the Cantlings’ house as a youth, so he’s naturally wary when Charlie asks him to investigate whether his wife and adult children were responsible for the attempt on his life. The culprit could be Charlie’s daughter Melanie, who makes clear that she’s willing to use illegal substances for her own gain, or it might be his son, Theo, whose erratic behavior makes his motivations very difficult to read. Maybe it’s daughter Ann, for whom both Benjamin and his brother, Jody, have complex feelings. However, Benjamin eventually learns that the already-thorny situation is even more complex than he thought. As Jody notes to Benjamin early on, “You might have had a scholarship to Yale, but you don’t know shit about Charlie Cantling.” Orr’s novel relies heavily on maintaining a mysterious atmosphere and nearly everyone is a suspect to some degree; Benjamin quickly finds that everyone has their guards up, and for very good reason. The stakes in this story involve inheritance money, of course, but also who gets to control the next generation of the Cantling legacy. As things clarify over the course of this exciting tale, however, astute readers get opportunities to pick up on oddities that will unlock the mystery. Some of these readers, though, may find the ending to be somewhat contrived; in its attempts to surprise, the narrative finally falls into familiar tropes and patterns, employing obvious red herrings and foreshadowing.
A knotted and frequently engaging tale of deception and family secrets.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9798888245323
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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