A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.
A prima ballerina investigates a homicide by dangerous stage prop in this rollicking mystery.
Robbins’ third On Pointe yarn finds Leah Siderova, the aging, sore-kneed ballerina of New York City’s American Ballet Company, enmeshed in yet another murder at the world’s deadliest dance troupe. The victim this time is artist and set designer Maurice Kaminsky, who built a rickety escalator for Leah to ascend when she dances the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. Maurice turns up mangled to death in the contraption’s gears. Suspects include Maurice’s husband, Brett, the company’s domineering choreographer; Tex, Leah’s dance partner, who may have been sleeping with the victim; a filmmaker who was shooting a documentary about the designer; Maurice’s art dealer, who stands to gain from the inflation of his paintings’ prices; and Victor Roth, a wolfishly charming lawyer. Assisting Leah is her posse of amateur detectives, including her crime writer mother, Barbara; her Aunt Rachel; the dancer’s cagey Russian ballet coach, Madame Maksimova; and Olga Shevchenko, Madame’s friend, who may be in the Russian mob. Along the way, Leah juggles relationships with hunky emergency room doctor Zach Mitchell and Jonah Sobol, the sexy but poker-faced police detective assigned to the case. When another body plummets from the sky, Leah fears that she might be the killer’s next target. Robbins, a former ballerina, steeps the novel in the glamorous grunge of the dance world as Leah nurses her aching body, obsessively counts the calories in every spinach leaf, dodges a too-familiar donor, and fences with her (metaphorically) back-stabbing rival, Kerry Blair. The author stocks the story with sharply etched characters and deploys vast schools of red herring to keep readers guessing as Leah and her pals ponder every possible perpetrator. Robbins renders this well-observed zoo in lively prose that weaves between catty humor—“When I dance Juliet’s death scene, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. If you get top billing, there won’t be a dry eye at the box office”—and bloody mayhem. (“His head lay at an odd angle, and he had four severe cuts, one on his face and three across his chest. Glitter from the set was mixed in with the blood.”) The result is a suspenseful romp with loads of atmosphere.
A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9781685121969
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
