A gamified reading experience that effectively pulls the reader into the story.
In Lamar’s formally playful mystery novel, the reader is the private investigator in a case of attempted murder.
This thriller combines a murder mystery with a puzzle game, positioning the reader as the investigator. Provided with multiple case files presented in a specific order, readers are called to solve the mystery as they sift through the evidence. These case files take the forms of diagrams, letters, diary entries, and police interviews, each filled with potential clues as to the culprit and motives behind the mysteries presented in the novel. The primary mystery, set in 2023, concerns the disappearance of Sillian Parks. Much of this evidence is relayed by Jane Parks, Sillian’s twin sister. Jane takes the narrative reins for this portion of the novel, though she proves to not be the most reliable of narrators. This is one of the novel’s triumphs: Simple obfuscation owing to the narrative’s point of view works wonders in keeping the mystery alive, even as clues are not-so-subtly revealed. The book is divided into 10 “Case Files,” which are further divided into smaller pieces of evidence. Most of the files conclude with hints for the reader to consider about the clues provided throughout, and the head detective delivers larger updates at some crucial points. Apart from Jane’s portions of the narrative, the most plentiful evidence comes from the diary of Mary Sophomore, who famously disappeared, along with her twin sister and their husbands, in the 1940s. This thread provides a parallel narrative to the twins in the present day, and their connection becomes integral to solving the mystery. The historical account is the most engaging element of the novel, as Lamar’s prose displays delightful wit in these passages (“next to the abandoned body that the ants had already found, I turned to face her and speak in a hushed tone. ‘I’m forever in debt. Thank you.’ She placed her hand on the car’s door handle. ‘Yes, you are’”). All of characters read as white, but there is some diversity in sexual orientation.
A gamified reading experience that effectively pulls the reader into the story.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9798218323851
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Experiment 42
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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