A graceful mystery that pirouettes around a cast of entertaining narcissists.
Metaphorical back-stabbing in a ballet troupe leads to the real thing in this whodunit.
The sprightly first installment of Robbins’ On Pointe Mystery series finds Leah Siderova, a 30-something principal dancer in New York City’s American Ballet Company, hoping to make a comeback from knee surgery by starring in hot choreographer Bryan Leister’s new work. She loses out to Arianna Bonneville, the company’s new ingénue, 10 years her junior and possessed of superlative talent and sly cruelty. (“I used to watch you dance when I was still a little girl,” she purrs to Leah.) When Leah finds Arianna in the costume room with dress shears planted in her back, all signs point to her as the perp because 1) she clumsily put her fingerprints on the murder weapon; 2) the whole company heard her threaten to cut the victim down during a tiff; and 3) when asked who attacked her, Arianna murmured “Leah” before expiring. Shrewd, handsome police detective Jonah Sobol likes Leah for the crime, and even her Uncle Morty, a lawyer, thinks she should cop a plea. But she’s determined to prove her innocence by finding the real killer. The suspects include Zarina Devereaux, an amoral French ballerina and rival of Arianna’s; various men and women who may have been sleeping with or jealous of the two dancers; and many corps de ballet peons whom the victim tormented. With the police closing in, Leah goes on the lam in disguise to continue her investigation—and discovers a world of salt-of-the-earth types very different from the ruthless denizens of her dancer’s bubble. In this limber yarn, Robbins, an ex–ballet dancer and author of Lesson Plan for Murder(2017), deploys her tartly witty prose to offer a delicious, well-observed sendup of the ballet world. The plot has red herrings, arbitrarily withheld evidence, and third act problems, but that doesn’t detract from the fun of watching Leah navigate atop her aching, blistered feet through the labyrinth of balletic cattiness and vanity (Zarina “peered around my shoulder to look in the mirror that hung behind me, checking to see that she was still as beautiful as she was five minutes earlier”). Readers will root for Leah as she sleuths her way through the troupe’s comic excesses.
A graceful mystery that pirouettes around a cast of entertaining narcissists.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947915-74-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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BOOK REVIEW
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