An intricate puzzle in a lively setting.
Amateur sleuth Harriet Gordon investigates the death of a military officer's wife in 1910 Singapore.
The murder of Sylvie Nolan, the young wife of Lt. Col. John Nolan of the South Sussex Regiment, rocks the British expatriate community of colonial Singapore. Despite the difference in their ages, the Nolans seemed a loving couple. Both were military brats with long family histories of service to the South Sussex. And despite her youth, vivacious Sylvie filled the role of the colonel’s lady admirably. Her abrupt arrival may have been a little hard on Jack, Nolan’s son from a previous marriage, and on Nolan’s sister, Priscilla, who kept house for the colonel before Sylvie’s arrival. But the residents of the Blenheim Road neighborhood that surrounds the regiment’s barracks are unanimous in their praise of Sylvie’s social graces. No one can give Inspector Robert Curran, of the Straits Settlements Police Force, any reason why someone would have bashed in Sylvie’s head with a candlestick while she slept. Still, Curran must find a suitable suspect quickly, since Maj. Percival Goff is champing at the bit to snatch the investigation away from the civilian police and turn it over to the military. Fortunately, Harriet, a widow who works for the police as a typist, is only too willing to help. Although Curran reminds Harriet repeatedly that she works for the police, not as a police officer, her agile mind, relentless curiosity, and understanding of the human heart are assets he can’t easily dismiss as he battles to preserve the sovereignty of the civil authority.
An intricate puzzle in a lively setting.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984802-66-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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
Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.
Hoping to set up shop as a private detective, Australian mystery novelist Ernest Cunningham winds up literally in the middle of the world’s most complicated bank robbery.
Ernest and Juliette, his fiancée and prospective partner, think they’ve been invited to a meeting at Huxley’s Bank in Sydney to secure a loan that will underwrite their agency. Of course not, bank director Winston Huxley informs them scornfully; he wants them to investigate the disappearance of his brother, Edward Huxley, the bank’s co-director, who vanished two days after changing the codes necessary to open the vault. Since the bank would be ruined if Winston let the authorities know it can’t access its own resources, it’s all up to Ernest, with a little help and more than a little pushback from Juliette. No sooner have they settled in than a masked thief enters Huxley’s and takes everyone in the bank hostage. In a way, that’s poetic justice, since every single hostage—from TV producer Remy Allard to unspeaking priest Father Gabriel to gravely ill 20-year-old Cordelia Bright and Laverna Bright, her grandmother and caregiver—turns out to have stolen something, and at least one of them is guilty of murder, too. Making throwaway deductions at a breathless pace en route to the climactic “parlour scene,” Ernest, who introduces himself in a flashforward that shows him locked in that vault with a limited air supply, saves plenty of ratiocination for this denouement, where he solves puzzles that many of his most devoted fans won’t even have recognized as puzzles at all.
Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780063434387
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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