A fun and finely crafted cozy L.A. whodunit.
An aspiring private investigator takes on a case at the behest of a psychic in Sideris’ sixth mystery in a series.
One week ago, 72-year-old JoJo Means, the matriarch of the wealthy but dysfunctional Means family, died alone in her well-appointed Victorian home in the tiny, elite Los Angeles suburb of Los Ranchos. There was no sign of foul play—she was found lying peacefully in her bed—but the deceased’s sister, Marti Means, is convinced that the fit, active JoJo must have been murdered, and Marti’s personal psychic, Heidi Honeyman, agrees. JoJo had signed a document stating that she didn’t want an autopsy (she “couldn’t stand the thought of being cut up in some lab,” says JoJo’s son, Bart), so Marti hires Corrie Locke, a junior attorney and not-yet-licensed private investigator, to dig into the evidence surrounding JoJo’s death. Corrie has a day job in the legal department of a film studio, but she and her assistant, Veera Bankhead, have been moonlighting as PIs. Corrie doesn’t think much of psychic intuition, although her boyfriend, Michael, pretends to be a psychic to attract supernaturally inclined clients, and Corrie isn’t afraid of bending the truth to get her small business off the ground. She’s initially skeptical that JoJo was killed, but as she starts sniffing around the Means family, she realizes there are several cash-strapped relatives with the motivation, and the means, to commit a murder—and maybe more than one. Over the course of this novel, Sideris writes in clean, taut sentences, inflecting moments of tension with humor: “A man lay on his side, arms bent in front of him, fingers clasped together. He could’ve been sleeping except for the pistol near his bloody head.” In Corrie, the author has created an endearing and energetic protagonist who lies and trespasses with ease, and whose unusual weapon of choice is the Japanese throwing star (although she also carries a handgun, like many literary PIs). Overall, this is a well-plotted mystery that will surely win more fans to Sideris’ series.
A fun and finely crafted cozy L.A. whodunit.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781685125004
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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