A fun, lightweight read for mystery fans that will also keep occultists and bibliophiles happy.
Buck Hubbell wasn’t the most popular book dealer in Atlanta, but it appears that someone disliked him enough to murder him in Charles’ debut mystery tale, which also involves the disappearance of an antique spell book.
The world of book-dealing can be treacherous, it seems. While browsing at an estate sale, Molly O’Donnell and Emma Clarke discover Hubbell’s dead body in a cellar that’s lined with shelves of antiquarian books. A mysterious note found beside the corpse reads, “Whosoever readeth this boke without leave of the Circle, let him BEWARE.” A closer look reveals that the note, which appears to be from the Elizabethan or Jacobean era, is a piece of ephemera that’s fallen from the aforementioned volume, written by someone with the initials “SF.” Intrigued, Molly pockets the note before the police arrive and, with Emma’s help, sets about finding the book, identifying the author, and working out exactly why it was worth killing for. After Emma temporarily steals the rare book Against the Diabolical, by C.S. Lewis, from the private stock of another antique bookseller, a further clue is revealed: In the text, Lewis refers to a small, 17th-century book of spells that had been shown to him by a student who mysteriously died soon after. Further investigation leads Emma to Shirley Parnell, a professor of religion who seems to know more about the spell book than she’s willing to admit. Charlene Ball and Libby Ware, who write together under the pen name Lily Charles, have crafted a charming pastiche of the age-old body-in-the-cellar mystery genre—one that’s full of hidden passageways, occult rituals, and, of course, amateur sleuthing. It treads a fine line between homage and cliché, and the rather bland title probably won’t inspire a great deal of confidence in prospective readers. However, skeptics should take note that this book manages to rise above much of the competition owing to its consistently jovial and easygoing narrative style as well as its informative discussions of Renaissance sorcery.
A fun, lightweight read for mystery fans that will also keep occultists and bibliophiles happy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64437-244-9
Page Count: 249
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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