A well-paced and entertaining series opener with an appealing protagonist.
A small-town veterinarian practicing near the Virginia–North Carolina border makes a house call and discovers the lifeless body of one of her human clients in Dean’s series-starting mystery.
Readers meet 39-year-old veterinarian Dr. Ginny Reese as she’s administering deworming medication to Dolly, a bull python currently wrapped around her torso. It’s just the start of her eventful day; her next stop is a visit to local resident Amanda Kelly’s home, with its breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to begin treatment for her cantankerous Siamese cat Ming’s hyperthyroidism. Amanda, a successful artist, is both a client and a friend; unfortunately, as Ginny discovers, she’s also deceased—lying at the bottom of her swimming pool. Ginny, a weak swimmer, jumps into the water fully clothed in a futile attempt to save her, almost drowning herself in the effort. Fortunately, her 90-pound German shepherd, Remington, is there to pull her to the shallow end. When the police arrive, Ginny discovers to her dismay that the new sheriff is Joe Donegan, her former high school boyfriend, who left her—and the town of Greenbrier—behind 20 years ago. Ginny becomes both a person of interest and a potential target for the murderer, who’s still at large. Dean keeps the pages turning in a tightly crafted mystery with a gently vulnerable but pleasantly edgy heroine. The story offers a hefty supply of suspects who have their eyes on Amanda’s sizable estate, and a couple of nice twists will have readers guessing until the surprise ending. One potentially threatening barroom brawl turns laugh-out-loud funny and helps to establish Ginny as a strong and promising lead for her own series. The dialogue flows naturally throughout, with a healthy mix of humor and political intrigue, despite occasional duplicate phrases, which might have been caught by a stronger edit. Animal lovers will appreciate Dean’s knowledgeable, affectionate descriptions of Ginny’s interactions with her furry patients.
A well-paced and entertaining series opener with an appealing protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-454866-36-5
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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