A captivating mystery that oozes charm, danger, and romance.
A young woman vacations in the Greek isles, hoping for rest and relaxation; she finds mystery and murder instead.
In this first of Monnin’s Intrepid Traveler mysteries, 35-year-old American Stefanie Adams becomes lost walking in Fira, the capital of Santorini, a Greek island in the Aegean. Thomas Burkhardt, a handsome, 40-ish German, comes to her rescue when a pair of tipsy men harasses her. After sharing a drink, the two part without exchanging numbers and “before he could make an offer she didn’t want to refuse.” The next day, she sees him at a museum exhibition where she admires the legendary Snake Goddess of Akrotiri, a small, exquisite gold statue. When the museum is evacuated due to a burst pipe, someone steals the artifact. Emma Keller, a newlywed at the exhibition with her husband, Jason, suggests Stefanie might be involved in the theft. Emma knows Stefanie’s father was connected to the robbery of a similar Greek statue 40 years earlier. Stefanie’s anger at Emma’s inference turns to shock the next day when she finds her murdered in the VIP section of a ferry headed to Crete. Two crimes—the statue theft and Emma’s homicide—link to Stefanie. “Coincidences require more scrutiny,” says a policeman, noting how often Stefanie’s path crossed with Emma’s in the days before she died. Stefanie vows to find the killer. It must be someone in the VIP section—the suspects include a bearded backpacker, a sun-tanned Brit, a glamorous redhead, her male companion, newlywed Jason, and Thomas. Stefanie turns out to be an intriguing protagonist. In addition to Thomas’ looks and charisma, she is drawn to his love of antiquities. She studied to be an archaeologist but then, in a seemingly unusual career move, became a private banker. Along with the striking hero, murder, and thievery, the adventure of foreign travel is a hallmark of Monnin’s engaging book. The story’s sense of place is enriched by the author’s personal familiarity with the Greek isles’ rocky shores, volcanic sand beaches, and brilliant blue sky. Images are strong, such as a yellow gauze shawl draped on bare shoulders and a meal of soutzoukakia and dolmades ending with rich Greek coffee.
A captivating mystery that oozes charm, danger, and romance.Pub Date: May 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68512-104-4
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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