A fresh mystery with solid storytelling.
A formerly Amish young woman investigates mysterious deaths in her old community in Qnert’s mystery novel.
Sadie Beiler has made an authentic life for herself outside of her family’s Amish community in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As Sadie states, “I only have a handful of friends. I struggle to afford basic necessities. I’m floundering to find a faith that feels right. And I only have myself to rely upon. But I am free.” She lives next to her fellow ex-community member and best friend, Eli, with whom she often commiserates about their strict upbringing. Though Sadie now lives in the “English” world, she still keeps in touch with her family. Following a recent spate of perplexing deaths among her family and friends, Sadie notes how many Amish residents of Lancaster County are ill. She goes into overdrive investigating what could be plaguing her former community. Eli begins acting strangely and acquires large quantities of rat poison; Sadie suspects her friend may be contaminating Amish farm goods. Additionally, her friend’s younger sister Leah goes missing, and Sadie promises to search for her; she also meets Miriam, another ex-Amish girl, whom she takes in and helps ease into secular life. Meanwhile, Sadie’s mother is sick and has growths on her arm where a local doctor has been administering “vitamin elixirs.” Told mostly through Sadie’s point of view, the narrative is periodically relayed from the perspective of “the captive,” a mysterious character who has been shackled and imprisoned by an unnamed jailor. In these chapters and others, Qnert does not shy away from tackling tough subjects (including sexual assault), particularly as they relate to the cultural customs and beliefs of the Amish. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the story is the focus on the predisposition of the Amish to “various genetic disorders” and their subsequent immunity to cancer, known as the “founder effect.” The prose is sometimes repetitive, but the story, with its unique premise, is engaging overall.
A fresh mystery with solid storytelling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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