Like its characters, this mystery is engaging, compelling, and rough around the edges.
Members of an Oklahoma family trying to recover from tragedy reel from the news that the incarcerated relative who terrorized them is being released from prison.
In this third installment of Lipinski’s mystery series, Zane Clearwater, six weeks into police training, learns that his half brother, Clyde Doom, will get out of prison to await a new trial. Clyde had been convicted of kidnapping Zane’s sister, Lettie, now 16 years old and pregnant. Clyde’s conviction was overturned on a technicality. Oklahoma’s 2020 McGirt ruling will allow Clyde to be out on bail before a new trial because, like Zane, he is part Cherokee, and the crime occurred within Native American borders when he was a juvenile. Zane lives in a mobile home with his grandmother Verda, Lettie, and the teen’s boyfriend, Angel. After learning of Clyde’s upcoming release, Lettie gets spooked when she receives a baby rattle from an anonymous sender, and the police academy suspends Zane because he’s accused of selling meth. Someone seems to be working with still-incarcerated Clyde to upset the family members and probably hurt them in retribution for past events. To protect his family, Zane adopts a big guard dog and engages in what Angel calls “hillbilly security”: placing junkyard metal around the trailer’s perimeter that will “make it noisy for an intruder to come near.” Zane’s girlfriend, Tiffany, assists in setting up a video and lighting security system. Along with these measures, Zane fights feelings of violence, which plagued him in the past, as they continue to ramp up. In this captivating tale, descriptions are often vivid and precise, such as that of a woman with spidery clots of mascara-laden eyelashes and a man whose “mouth pinched like he was sucking food out of his teeth.” But they can be clunky, too: “Hearing his current girlfriend’s name brought her face and smile into his mind.” Reading this series in order would be preferable, as incidents from the players’ brutal pasts are jarring to read in summarized sentences. Still, this gripping installment features a cast of intriguing characters and a memorable, complex hero. In addition, the tale is timely, with a reference to Covid-19 and pro and con stances on policing.
Like its characters, this mystery is engaging, compelling, and rough around the edges.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Majestic Content Los Angeles
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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