A tranquil mystery from Berry (Death and the Walking Stick, 2005, etc.), with oodles of down-home charm.
Cross a bicentennial celebration with a family reunion and you’re bound to get unexpected consequences.
In the little town of Ogeechee, Ga., almost everyone is related, making it difficult for Police Chief Henry Huckabee and Officer Trudy Roundtree to find a murderer who’s not a family member. Now the Stubbs clan has gathered in Ogeechee. Those who don’t live in town are staying at Stubbs House, a B&B newly renovated and run by sisters Della and Willie. The reunion is compromised when Kevin Purvis, a Stubbs cousin, sends a college pal to announce he’s eloped with Gretchen Holland, reputed love child of his great uncle, former mayor Julian Stubbs. Trudy is at Stubbs House investigating the disappearance of Aunt Inez’s diamond earrings when Julian takes a deadly tumble down the stairs clutching a framed family tree. Trudy suspects—and the autopsy confirms—it was no accident. A bag full of antiques found in the yard complicates the case. Apart from the usual family jealousies, Trudy also has to deal with her old high-school friend Shawna, Kevin’s sister, hitting on her boyfriend and stirring up stories from the past. Luckily, a little local knowledge goes a long way toward solving the crime.
A tranquil mystery from Berry (Death and the Walking Stick, 2005, etc.), with oodles of down-home charm.Pub Date: May 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-59414-526-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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