Cahoon launches a promising new series with endearing characters and a charming locale.
A discarded bride starts a new life as, yes, an amateur sleuth.
Meg Gates was just days away from her wedding when the groom and one of her bridesmaids left together on the honeymoon she had planned. Now she’s cleaning out the apartment in Seattle she shared with Romain and heading with her dog, Watson, to Bainbridge Island, where she grew up. On the island, she’ll have support from her best friend, Natasha, who owns a bakery, and Dalton, her brother’s best friend and her own childhood buddy, who works on the ferry. She plans to work part-time at her mom’s bookstore, live in an apartment over her aunt’s garage, and spend her off hours doing research for local mystery author L.C. Aster. She’s also thinking about her longtime ambition to write a guide teaching regular people how to solve mysteries. Then a mystery is dropped into her own lap: Lilly Aster’s agent, Robert Meade, is found dead on Lilly’s dock after she fired him for stealing, and Lilly, of course, is a suspect. Meg is sure she’s innocent, but the police chief—Meg’s uncle Troy—isn’t convinced. So Meg, Dalton, and Natasha team up, and Meg uses her old Nancy Drew powers to investigate while seeking to develop useful tips for her book. It comes out that Meade had lent money to several locals, including Natasha, and that Lilly has an ex-husband who often visits her. When Romain reappears, Meg’s mom thinks she should try to rekindle their romance, but it’s obvious to everyone else that Dalton is in love with her, and although she’s not ready for a new romance, Meg knows she’ll never forgive Romain.
Cahoon launches a promising new series with endearing characters and a charming locale.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781496752093
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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