A sensational gumshoe and vivid setting elevate this whodunit, notwithstanding a few stumbles.
In LeBlanc’s mystery, one of the enthusiasts at a Florida Renaissance fair may be guilty of murder.
Detective Sara Lansing’s latest homicide case involves a dead knight in a dragon—more specifically, a dragon swing. Someone has fatally stabbed Gunnar the Undefeated, a “rennie” in attendance at a Renaissance fair in the city of Reunion Heights, Florida. As the two-month event slowly wraps up, Sara has just over a week to identify the killer before the fair closes. Her boss, Chief McBride, has stuck her with NYPD detective Ryker Harris; the “big city cop” is actually down south looking into Corbin Foster, a suspected drug lord and murderer now campaigning to become Reunion Heights’ mayor. Foster’s opponent is none other than McBride, who needs Ryker’s help in ensuring he doesn’t lose to a criminal. Meanwhile, the detectives have a murder case with evidence to sift through, including DNA, signs of a tattoo on Gunnar’s body, and 800 fair-going suspects to question. The investigation is barely underway when Foster’s thugs threaten Sara; they claim to have dirt on her estranged father that they threaten to release to the media unless she stalls the investigation and convinces the police chief to exit the mayoral race. Sara, however, is determined to find the killer, who is likely hiding among the rennies. If she works quickly enough, Sara may be able to solve the homicide and, with a little luck, take down Foster as well, all while keeping her dad safe.
LeBlanc’s hero detective is a winner. Sara has endured an abusive, alcoholic mother, doesn’t question helping a father who abandoned her when she was only 10, and chases down a gunman twice her size with ease. She leads a solid mystery; the fair teems with suspects, as Gunnar wasn’t a particularly wholesome guy, and Ryker even suggests Foster is behind the murder simply to discredit his electoral rival by publicly criticizing the investigation. The author sets this story in a memorable place, rich in such Renaissance village sights as era-appropriate tunics, an array of weapons, and festival foods. Diverting reminders of the modern day pop up at amusing moments: “Four knights were engaged in mock battles wearing sweats rather than armor or chainmail. The only vestiges of weekend attire were sheaths and scabbards attached to their belts.” Readers also catch glimpses of Florida’s less well-known wildlife (including boars and an aardvark) along with the gators and snakes encountered in a terrific scene that unfolds in a swamp. Unfortunately, while punchy dialogue gives this murder mystery a hearty boost, characters too often voice heavy-handed metaphors in describing themselves or past circumstances. Sara, for example, continually references a figurative locked broom closet like the literal one she hid in as a child—a repetitive and too on-the-nose expression of her mother’s traumatic abuse. Still, an engrossing final act leads to a worthy denouement and the possibility of more adventures with Sara and/or Ryker.
A sensational gumshoe and vivid setting elevate this whodunit, notwithstanding a few stumbles.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780978535339
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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