Strong female protagonists and an intelligent, creepy setup make this mystery installment memorable.
A car crash raises terrifying implications in the latest installment of the Josie Quinn mystery series.
Despite living in a small city in Central Pennsylvania, Det. Josie Quinn can’t seem to even take a day off without a gruesome crime scene needing her attention. She and her husband, Noah, a fellow detective, are hoping to adopt and trying to ready the house for a home visit from an adoption agency when Josie gets called in to the scene of an unusual car wreck. Josie quickly sees something even more gruesome than a head-on collision—evidence that the two women in the mangled car were involved in an intense, bloody struggle before the accident. The driver is barely clinging to life, and the other woman has a defensive stab wound and a knife stuck in her abdomen. The only clue to what happened to the women is a single piece of paper, a child’s drawing with the chilling word “HELP” scribbled on the back. When the driver, Mira Summers, wakes up, all she can remember is riding horses at the Tranquil Trails stables that morning, but she has no recollection of the attack or the Jane Doe riding in her car. With the help of her trusted colleague, Gretchen Palmer, Josie quickly discovers that the family running Tranquil Trails has anything but tranquil secrets; the owner warns them that she believes her disturbed brother-in-law may have been capable of such an attack. At the same time, Josie begins to question whether Mira’s selective amnesia is a ruse to cover up vital information. As both detectives race against time to piece together what happened and to save a child who may be in grave danger, they are drawn into a complex family drama that offers no simple answers.
Building on previous episodes in the series, Regan’s Josie Quinn remains a remarkable, strong protagonist. (At the site of the particularly grisly car wreck scene, Josie showcases her ability to squash visceral reactions in favor of getting her job done, remarking only, “It’s not what I expected.”) Josie’s husband, Noah, is again a reliable partner. But the more exciting pair is Josie and Gretchen. Through them, Regan creates a formidable duo that won’t take any nonsense as they rush to save a young child in danger. As they stumble deeper into an intricate family drama, Regan also smartly turns her lead character’s anxieties about adoption and parenthood into concrete aspects of the case she is trying to solve. Astute mystery readers may see where the investigation is going from a mile away, but there are plenty of suspenseful surprises and action-packed sequences before the final reveals. Also adding to the tension are some chilling scenes showing the young child in question, who’s watching their captor and waiting for rescue. “It reminds me of the blood,” the child thinks, seeing people move in a shadowy room, “Whose blood?The whisper is back.” It’s a chilling and effective addition to help keep this twisted mystery moving.
Strong female protagonists and an intelligent, creepy setup make this mystery installment memorable.Pub Date: May 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781835254721
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Bookouture
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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