The appended specialty grilled cheese recipes and a hint of romance add spice to a promising new series.
Eschewing her beloved cats, last seen in The Girl With the Kitten Tattoo (2020), Reilly debuts a cheesy new series.
After the death of her husband, Carly Hale returns to her charming Vermont hometown and opens her dream restaurant devoted to all things grilled cheese. All goes well until her new landlord, Lyle Bagley, gives her notice that he plans to turn her shop into a boutique run by his girlfriend, Tiffany. When Tiffany finds Lyle dead in the alley behind the restaurant, Carly’s an obvious suspect, but there are many others who hated Lyle. Unfortunately, one of them is Carly’s valued worker, Suzanne, whose dicey position makes Carly decide to do a bit of sleuthing. The police chief is an old family friend who takes time from a rash of high-end burglaries to warn Carly to be careful. It turns out that Lyle was a dishonest slum landlord whose adoring secretary did his bidding and that his half brother, who’s still furious over not getting their father’s Cadillac, is back in town. The editor of the town’s free weekly newspaper, whom Carly once babysat, wants her to team up with him to find the killer. Getting help from friends who go all the way back to high school, Carly apparently spooks the culprit, whose threatening notes suggest that she may be slated to be the next victim.
The appended specialty grilled cheese recipes and a hint of romance add spice to a promising new series.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72823-832-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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