A light and amusing whodunit that proves time spent in the company of the heroine is time well spent indeed.
Stella Reynolds investigates a pair of murders in this latest installment of Kirsch’s (The Big Interview, 2016, etc.) chick-lit mystery series.
Book 3 finds the intrepid reporter and amateur detective on the trail of a major drug ring in Knoxville, Tennessee. Stella has moved up the journalism food chain, enjoying a good job in a larger market. She doesn’t have to carry her own TV equipment, and she is far more comfortable with those tricky live shots. Outside of work, Stella is living with her old friend Janet Black, across town from ex-boyfriend John, and still considering her options with former flame and NASCAR driver Lucky Haskins. When Stella covers an overnight shift that morphs from a house fire to a murder, she soon finds herself on a complicated and dangerous case. Two homicides in one night appear to be connected, and the suspect who’s in jail may not be the guilty party. An anonymous tipster pushes Stella to look deeper at the killings, and it becomes apparent that Knoxville’s low crime rates are an illusion. Widespread drug and gang problems lie just below the surface, and government officials, detectives, and leading business owners are all on the take. Kirsch’s third Stella Reynolds mystery still feels fresh and fun. Though the narrative follows a predictable format—what seems to be a straightforward crime is a coverup with larger ramifications—it is still enjoyable to watch the mystery unravel. Kirsch’s leading lady remains a funny and relatable heroine. Her plucky attitude and aptitude for stumbling into sticky situations are pleasantly reminiscent of Janet Evanovich’s popular Stephanie Plum character. Roommate Janet provides an amusing, if somewhat clichéd, tough-nut foil to Stella’s optimism and do-gooder spirit. Stella’s love life is relevant but on the periphery, allowing the focus to remain on the case. One of the strongest facets of Kirsch’s series is her insider knowledge of journalism and TV reporting, which lends a feeling of authenticity to the plot and puts a unique spin on the cozy mystery genre.
A light and amusing whodunit that proves time spent in the company of the heroine is time well spent indeed.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9969350-3-6
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Sunnyside Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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