Readers will be treated to escapist fun and an homage to some beloved books.
Hare harks back to the age of Agatha Christie in a sparkling murder mystery set on an ocean liner crossing the Atlantic in 1936.
Jazz singer Lena Aldridge, who narrates this charmingly retro novel, boards the RMS Queen Mary with a hefty envelope of cash and a passel of secrets. For one thing, she just witnessed a murder—or maybe more than witnessed. The scumbag owner of the nightclub where she sings has been dispatched with a cyanide-laced drink, and just as she thinks it might be expeditious to skedaddle, she meets mysterious musical agent Charlie Bacon, who offers her an all-expenses-paid voyage to the New World. He says he’s working for a Broadway impresario, a friend of her late father’s, who would like to offer her a role on the Great White Way. In London, Lena didn’t conceal the fact that her father was Black, but Charlie advises her to pass for White while traveling in first class on the Queen Mary since “Americans could be funny about things like that.” Once onboard, she becomes entangled with the large and troubled Parker clan. The Parkers are one of those wealthy American families, complete with personal doctor and private secretary, in which everyone has something to conceal. Soon enough, one after another of the clan succumbs to murder. As the bodies are falling around her, Lena finds comfort in the company of Black musician Will Goodman, but he can’t prevent her becoming the target of several attacks before the mystery is finally solved. Lena—whose hard-won wisdom includes the fact that “four martinis on an empty stomach will always result in poor decision-making”—is an appealing heroine, and Hare handles her old-fashioned material with a light touch, a keen eye for period detail, and a sturdy grasp on her complicated but at least semicredible plot.
Readers will be treated to escapist fun and an homage to some beloved books.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-43925-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
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