A brisk and satisfactory sequel that earns extra credit for its well-read sleuth and other memorable characters.
A high school English teacher puts her strained marriage—and her life—at risk when she helps investigate the murder of a country club member in Robbins’ mystery, one in a series.
Liz Hopewell reluctantly arrives at the Meadowfields Country Club for a golf lesson, a belated and unwanted birthday gift from her husband. The unathletic and underdressed outsider Liz is on her way to the driving range when she overhears an argument between formerly married couple Elliot and Melinda Tumbleson: “I’ll see you dead before I let you get away with this,” Melinda threatens. Later, Liz comes across Elliot’s body in the club’s bushes. He has been clobbered with a golf club—one belonging to Liz. What’s an amateur sleuth to do but investigate? Liz reunites with detective Tom Harriman (from Robbins’ 2017 Lesson Plan for Murder); her husband is not thrilled by the prospect. (“This is a disaster,” he complains.) Taking cues from classic literature, Liz zeroes in on two obvious suspects: Elliot’s first wife, Melinda, and younger new wife, Sonya. “Anyone who was married to him had to have wanted to kill him,” Liz reasons, tongue-in-cheek. These events occur on the anniversary of Liz’s mother’s death, and Liz’s sister Susan, her partner in solving crimes, finds evidence that their mother’s death was not accidental. Both cases will teach Liz that when it comes to murder, she has a lot to learn. Liz Hopewell is a refreshing figure on the sleuthing scene; dispensing with the wisecracks used by her more hard-boiled brethren, she cites literary quotes that encapsulate the situation. A former teacher herself, Robbins populates her story with indelible characters such as Melinda, who uses her position as school-board president to hassle, bully, and blackmail Liz to do right by her spoiled, coddled son. The mystery surrounding her mother’s death further fleshes out Liz’s family backstory, and her growing estrangement from her husband points to a new chapter in her life.
A brisk and satisfactory sequel that earns extra credit for its well-read sleuth and other memorable characters.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781685127121
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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