An involving mystery elevated by vivid characterizations.
A black police detective investigating a murder finds himself drawn to a white woman who claims to have psychic visions of the killer.
In time-honored, crime novel tradition, Detective Jesse Aaron gets his world rocked when a beautiful woman enters his office with information about a “nasty case with no easy answers.” The murder victim is Rosa Logan. Sariah Brennan states she knows who the killer is. “I don’t know his full name, but he’s called Casey,” she informs Aaron. “A big dark man with a scar on his neck.” When Aaron asks her whether she was an eyewitness to the crime, she responds: “I saw him…in my head, like in a vision.” The incredulous Aaron is surprised when parts of Brennan’s story check out, including key information that had been withheld from the media. Complicating matters is that the suspect, Kazimir Capek, or K.C., has reportedly been dead for three years. Brennan not only sticks to her story, she also insists to Aaron and his black female partner, Camille Farris, that the killer is still alive and another woman, named Elisabeth, is in danger. Aaron doesn’t know what to make of Brennan. Farris is openly hostile, bad cop to his good cop (“If you’re through wasting our time, we have work to do”). But Aaron cannot convince himself he is just intrigued by the mystery. He wonders whether something is happening between him and Brennan: “When she asked him to call her Sariah, did she guess how easily he already thought of her that way?” Griffin has a gift for romantic suspense. Aaron and Brennan’s budding relationship, which is complicated by her secrets, builds deliberately and credibly and elicits as much interest as the resolution of the murder case. The issue of race adds an intriguing wrinkle to old school murder mystery tropes, although this could have been developed further. When Brennan remarks that she isn’t used to being alone with someone she doesn’t know, Aaron wonders if “someone” maybe means a black man. And Farris’ tirades include her objection to “brothers who try to score points by getting a white chick.” She tells Aaron: “It shouldn’t be so hard to stick to your own kind.”
An involving mystery elevated by vivid characterizations.Pub Date: March 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5092-3045-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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