A charming, book-centric whodunit.
Andrews’ sleuthing whiskey-maker investigates some bookish murders in this fourth mystery novel in a series.
Spring has come to Notchey Creek, Tennessee, and local distiller Harley Henrickson is taking in the seasonal splendor of the town’s Antiques and Blooms Festival. The festival’s great find turns out to be a signed first edition of the classic Charlotte Brontë novel Jane Eyre; one of Notchey Creek’s resident book appraisers values its worth at “hundreds of thousands” of dollars. The owner, Suzanne Clare, is wealthy, attractive, and new in town—and from what Harley hears from vague local gossip, she has a reputation for being “trouble.” Before long, a woman who was watching the appraisal is found stabbed to death behind a dumpster. Then Suzanne is found murdered, and the copy of Jane Eyre that was in her possession is missing. Police suspect it’s a case of burglary got awry, but Harley isn’t so sure. Harley’s good friend, a rich local rock star known as Beau Arson, is revealed to have a troubled past with the murder victim and becomes a prime suspect in her death. Harley must closely read the clues to solve this literary mystery. Andrews’ novel is a loving ode to books and the people who love them, and her prose has the warm feel of a well-worn hardback, as when she lushly describes the library at one of the town’s gothic mansions: “Dark oak paneling, bifurcated by rows of antique books, formed a panoply of vintage color, which climbed from the black-and-white ornamental tile floor to the high plaster ceiling.” Indeed, the novel is steeped in atmosphere, creating in Notchey Creek a kind of Appalachian version of Agatha Christie’s St. Mary Mead, complete with a 300-pound pet pig, and readers will be happy to wander through it. Some may find the vast cast to be a bit too crowded, but once there are murders to solve, they’ll find the novel to be a brisk ride.
A charming, book-centric whodunit.Pub Date: June 12, 2022
ISBN: 979-8829134976
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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