A romantic mystery that re-energizes its genre.
In Monnin’s whodunit, a rookie Interpol agent must unwrap the mysteries of a missing golden peacock, a pile of inconvenient bodies, and the past life of her new lover.
Stefanie Adams is a new member of Interpol’s Artifact Recovery Team, and Contessa Giuliana Bergamo is the wealthy scion of a fading Italian aristocracy. The contessa is looking to sell a piece of art to the highest bidder: specifically, a long-lost 15th-century pendant known as the Borgia Peacock. Stefanie aims to win the auction and return it to Milan’s Sforza Castle. She arrives at the contessa’s home in Venice on the eve of the Regata Storica, a masquerade ball on boats. Stefanie’s not the only one hoping to purchase the item, and after first offers are made, bidders start dying; one is stabbed in the throat with a steampunk-ish plague mask and another killed with a gold-handled letter opener. Stefanie’s almost crushed by runaway aluminum beer kegs while buying frittellas. In the chaos, the Borgia Peacock goes missing. Meanwhile, Thomas Burkhardt—who recruited Stefanie into this new career and proposed to her in the first series installment, Death in the Aegean (2022)—seems strangely close to the contessa’s great-niece Francesca, a potential murder suspect. Monnin places Stefanie’s relationship questions in the center of a sinuous plot with confident, clean prose studded with telling details that set scenes and act as clues. Situations drive the plot and build character, as when Stefanie’s challenged to identify differences between 15th-century jewels and 19th-century copies, or in her response to the aforementioned keg attack, after which she jokes about her crushed hat: “I think my fedora is ready for Last Rites.” If there’s a fault in this multifaceted jewel, it’s that Stefanie seems to wait for her own hero to act—but the author snaps her back to the real story, in which Stefanie’s the hero and performs admirably, despite her doubts. Solving a crime isn’t the same as solving a relationship, of course, but what makes this structure interesting is that the main mystery that’s Stefanie’s solving is herself.
A romantic mystery that re-energizes its genre.Pub Date: May 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781685123642
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
