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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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