An engaging mystery premise that’s let down by plodding pacing.
In Monnin’s series mystery, two vacationing Interpol agents investigate a murder while searching for a missing bracelet.
Stefanie Adams and Thomas Burkhardt are on a romantic getaway in St. George, Bermuda, taking a break from their work in the cultural heritage department of Interpol. Thomas’ main job is retrieving stolen artifacts, and Stefanie is part of his retrieval team; she also writes a travel blog. They’re renting a bungalow from archeologist Jeffrey Fitzsimmons, who enlists their help in trying to locate a missing gold and emerald bracelet. The artifact had initially been found at Fitzsimmons’ dig site at the Carmichael House, where the affluent Marlene and Lawrence Carmichael were hoping to place a designer garden. Stefanie and Thomas quickly begin posing questions to the rest of the team: Allan Ingram, a University of Virginia professor; Hunter Renko and Daphne Pasinski, Ingram’s students; and Beryl Swan, Fitzsimmons’ assistant. Other possible suspects include landscape architect Nathaniel Dimon and Fabiola Ortiz of the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Later, Stefanie and Thomas find a member of the team dead, and another is arrested for the murder; then the Carmichaels experience a break-in. Stefanie and Thomas race to find the culprit and the missing piece of jewelry, and their prime suspect changes with every new piece of information. Monnin’s story has echoes of Agatha Christie’s work, making the most of a large group of suspects and red herrings galore. The romance between Thomas and Stefanie, though only briefly developed, effectively adds another dimension to the tale (“What she really wanted was to decide on their future living situation. There was no question that they would be together”). However, the story is very much a slow burn, and the characters aren’t engaging enough to warrant such pacing. There are a few significant plot turns, but the story is mainly made up of Thomas and Stefanie questioning other characters and offering their opinions on who’s the most suspicious among them. The action picks up a bit toward the end, but the unsatisfying ending falls somewhere between a bang and a whimper.
An engaging mystery premise that’s let down by plodding pacing.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781685126483
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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