A charming whodunit with graceful writing and real heart.
Dance patrons are dropping like flies in this nimble ballet murder mystery, the fifth installment in Robbins’ On Pointe series.
Aging, knee-sore ballerina-turned-amateur detective Leah Siderova, a principal dancer with New York’s American Ballet Company, is up for a choreography prize for her new ballet when Leland Vanderhof, the prize’s wealthy sponsor, takes a 16-story swan dive from his balcony during a swanky fundraiser. Leah suspects murder and starts investigating at the behest of Leland’s widow, Arabella. Suspects include the icy Arabella herself and her fashion-designer lover; Arabella’s sullen assistant, Derrick, who benefits from Leland’s will; ABC’s scheming interim director, Marty Sherrington; Hollis Mark and Sierra Younger, Leah’s bitchy rivals for the prize; and Jonathan Llewellyn Franklin III, a lecherous Vanderhof Foundation board member who gets scratched off the list when he turns up dead from blunt-force trauma and carbon monoxide poisoning. Leah gets help from her usual entourage, including her mystery-writer mother, Barbara; ABC’s primeval ballet mistress Madame Maksimova and her gigantic Ukrainian sidekick, Olga; and abrasive NYPD detective Jonah Sobol, who fences with Leah over her interference in the case when he’s not passionately bedding her. The plot thickens as Leah glimpses a man following her, gets flummoxed when both Arabella and Barbara disappear, and deploys her dance-honed ability to read body language for emotional clues when pumping people for information. Along the way, Robbins details the grueling life of a ballerina—the constant aches and pains, the obsessive calorie counting, and the plangent awareness of time inexorably running out. (“The end comes for all of us. Is anyone ever ready for that farewell performance?”) Robbins’ characters are colorful and sharply drawn, and her prose is rich in psychological nuance conveyed through physical tension. (“I pressed the sharp end of a stiletto heel into his foot. I didn’t slam it with enough force to break any bones, which my leg muscles easily could have done. Just hard enough to let him know there were limits to how far he could push me.”) Robbins delivers another page-turner with deep emotional resonance.
A charming whodunit with graceful writing and real heart.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9798898200718
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Focus on people and places; leave the red herrings to someone else.
Perrin’s third Castle Knoll mystery moves to London, where Annie Adams investigates the murder of her mother’s protégé.
Acclaimed painter Laura Adams is known for her solitary ways. So Annie is perplexed, and a little piqued, to learn that her mother has taken art student Felicity Rowe under her wing, even allowing Fliss to share her Chelsea town house. Annie isn’t hard up for lodgings, since she inherited a fortune from her great-aunt Frances, but her concern over her mother’s new living arrangements brings her down from rural Dorset to assess the situation in person. That concern rises to the level of panic when Felicity turns up dead in a dumpster behind the house. Laura’s clearly hiding something, and to unravel the complex puzzle, Annie needs the help of her old friend, police Detective Rowan Crane. Felicity’s murder turns out to have roots in the decades-old death of socialite Vera Huntington, who partied with Frances in London’s jazz clubs back in the 1960s. Perrin handles the twin narratives deftly, giving careful attention to each and permitting their connection to develop richly. She allows the love interest in each story to follow their own peculiar trajectory. And she draws a vivid picture of London, both past and present. The solution to the puzzle, on the other hand, is easily foreseen and too long in coming. Perrin is at her considerable best when she concentrates on drawing sympathetic, believable characters facing tough emotional issues.
Focus on people and places; leave the red herrings to someone else.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217047505
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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