A sharp main character gives this conventional mystery a hearty boost.
Florida police detectives investigate when a frozen man’s death turns out to be murder in LeBlanc’s mystery sequel.
The naked corpse of an unidentified man turns up at a meatpacking plant in the city of Reunion Heights. Det. Sara Lansing and her partner, Ryker Harris, arrive at the scene and quickly identify Vance Miller, a popular mountaineer. Ligature marks on the victim’s wrists and ankles suggest that someone forced him into the freezer and let him die from exposure to frigid temperatures. There’s not much more evidence at the plant, though, so the detectives commence searching for anyone with a possible motive. At first, Miller doesn’t seem to have any enemies who would want to take him out. When Sara and Ryker dig further, however, they realize that the deceased’s team on a Mount Everest expedition includes four viable suspects. One is dealing with a life-changing injury, and another has been hard to track down since the morning after the murder. Miller’s involvement in another, near-fatal expedition, and the likelihood that he was cheating on his wife, together add to a mounting pile of possible suspects. Along the way, Sara has the chance to reconnect with two people who abandoned her—her ex-husband, whom she hasn’t seen in six years, and her father, who left her to be raised by an alcoholic mother. Meanwhile, Ryker, who’s been an absentee father, debates calling his daughter to attempt to repair their fractured relationship. As Sara and Ryker inch closer to a solution, the vengeful killer will do whatever it takes to stay out of prison.
Much of LeBlanc’s sophomore series installment plays like a typical police procedural as the detectives interview the expedition team one by one, question various spouses, and chat with Miller’s fellow pickleball players. It’s quite some time before they make any headway, though, which is one of the reasons that their boss, Chief McBride, is perpetually frazzled. Other possible suspects include a metal sculptor, a violin maker, and two people engaged in a mountain-climbing competition in which they must use a special key to open a safe full of prize money. The banter between the two leads is entertainingly persistent and primarily consists of them nosing into each other’s lives. Sara, for instance, urges Ryker to start a healthier diet; she scoffs at his stakeout food (“artery-clogging donuts”), but he assures her that a frosting-covered pastry “energizes [his] brain.” Ryker, who landed in some trouble back when he was a New York City cop, isn’t much of a detective; he’s overly aggressive, not especially bright, and apparently not in the best shape. Although he’s never actively detrimental to the investigation, it’s hardly surprising that Sara gets a significant break in the case when she’s working it by herself. The narrative engagingly ramps up in the latter half; the solution comes together a touch too quickly, but the detectives’ hunt for the culprit makes for a riveting final act. A sharp main character gives this conventional mystery a hearty boost.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9780978535391
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Ama Dablam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
