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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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