Penny (A Rule Against Murder, 2009, etc.) is a world-class storyteller. If you don’t want to move to Montreal with Gamache...
Chief Inspector Gamache of the Canadian Sûreté is again called to restore order to the tiny Quebecois hamlet of Three Pines.
Olivier and Gabri, gay owners of the Bistro and B&B, insist they that they don’t know the dead man and can’t imagine how he came to be lying on their floor. That’s not quite the truth, but it’s merely the setup for the first of many surprises. The real story will unravel for Gamache and his subordinates Beauvoir and Lacoste in startling ways. These include the discovery that the corpse has been moved three times by two different people; the return of a father declared dead over 20 years ago; a word woven into a spider’s web; and the disclosure of several wood carvings emanating evil that require Gamache to fly to British Columbia and inspect totem poles. Priceless antiques sequestered in a hermit’s cabin and sorrowful tales of Czech citizens cheated of their belongings will come to light before Gamache, to his considerable distress, will have to arrest a friend.
Penny (A Rule Against Murder, 2009, etc.) is a world-class storyteller. If you don’t want to move to Montreal with Gamache as your neighbor—or better yet, relocate to Three Pines and be welcomed into its community of eccentrics—you have sawdust in your veins, which must be very uncomfortable.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37703-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.
Two groups of besties a generation apart vie for the honor of being Bar Harbor’s top sleuths.
Divorced mother of two Hayley Powell has recently married Bruce Linney after years of a contentious relationship dating back to high school. Both work for the Island Times, she as a food columnist and he as a crime reporter. Six days before they’re to leave on their honeymoon cruise, their dream is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Hayley’s mother, Sheila, following a breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Dismayed by the sudden addition to their tiny house even though Sheila volunteers to petsit while they’re away, Hayley is upset by Sheila’s criticism of her clothes and her cleaning and cooking skills. Hayley’s best friends, Liddy and Mona (Death of a Wedding Cake Baker, 2019, etc.), are the daughters of Sheila’s high school buddies Jane and Celeste, who are appalled when they attend a barbecue where their old school enemy Caskie Lemon-Hogg shows up with a homemade blueberry pie. Caskie’s hobbies are blueberry picking, making and selling delicious treats, and flirting with other women’s husbands and boyfriends. So Hayley’s brainstorm for an impromptu class reunion for her mom’s friends ends in a nasty confrontation. Caskie takes out a restraining order against her former classmates, and Sheila moves to an inn after a fight with Hayley and badmouths Caskie all over town. When she finds Caskie dead in the room next to hers, Sheila’s naturally a suspect. Both sets of friends are determined to find the real killer even after Caskie’s closest friend, Regina Knoxville, verbally abuses them at the funeral. There are enough other suspects to put the inexperienced sleuths in danger of attracting attention from a determined killer.
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2493-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny...
A new round of troubles for the slow horses of Slough House, where burned-out, compromised, or incompetent members of Her Majesty’s intelligence community have been banished (Spook Street, 2017, etc.), pits them against a group of terrorists who seem to be working from MI5’s own playbook.
It doesn’t usually make headlines when a crew of uniformed men efficiently murder a dozen inhabitants of an isolated village, but when the target is Abbotsfield, in the shadow of the Derbyshire hills, attention must be paid. The time-servers at Slough House, the last group anyone in the know would expect to get anywhere near this outrage, are roped into it when Shirley Dander celebrates her 62nd drug-free day by saving her colleague Roderick Ho from getting run down by a car. Flatulent Jackson Lamb, the head of the troops at Slough House, doesn’t believe Shirley’s story of attempted vehicular homicide, but even he changes his tune after a second attempt on Ho’s life kills an intruder whose corpse promptly disappears and police match the bullets found at the scene to one of the weapons used in the Abbotsfield massacre. When someone tosses a bomb into the penguin shelter in Dobsey Park and a second bomb is disabled before it can blow up a Paddington-bound train, alarm bells go off for J.K. Coe, the newest arrival to Slough House, who realizes (1) these outrages are all being perpetrated by the same team, (2) they’re following a blueprint originally conceived by the intelligence community, and (3) they still have several escalating chapters left to go. Just in case this all sounds uncomfortably menacing, a subplot concerning the threats posed to the nation’s security by a cross-dressing Brexit partisan is uncomfortably comical.
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny as Bill James’ cops and robbers.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-961-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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