An intriguing if sometimes-baffling introduction to an elusive character.
An ordinary man becomes entangled in extraordinary circumstances in von Lindenberg’s debut novella and series launch.
Grady Sachs lives alone in a modest apartment in the small town of West Elm. His looks and demeanor are nondescript; he’s “everyone, but also no one in particular.” While working at a low-rent law firm, Grady uncovers a large corporation’s embezzlement. The ensuing legal battle is too much for his meager firm to handle, so a bigger law firm takes it over and Grady winds up unemployed. But it’s his work on that case that soon lands Grady a new job (after calling a number on an otherwise blank business card given to him by a mysterious stranger) as a “Business Investigator” for a shadowy organization whose name he apparently doesn’t catch. He’s to work his magic looking into Inventaratus Technologies, a research and engineering corporation. Grady infiltrates Inventaratus by taking a “cover job” as a mail clerk, and his investigation points him toward company owner and CEO Waylan Scott. This leads to a startling turn that Grady doesn’t anticipate and that will change his life in profound ways. Von Lindenberg injects a good deal of humor into this short, tightly written tale, especially its first half (Grady, at his first job, can’t distinguish his three-named bosses from one another). Grady is an affable protagonist who prefers his routine (starting every morning with a bowl of corn flakes), which makes the shift to a noticeably darker tone in the latter half of the narrative all the more jarring. While a blanket of mystery covers Inventaratus and its CEO, Grady is a bit of an enigma as well. The ending provides a touch of enlightenment, though its main purpose seems to be setting up the series that is to follow.
An intriguing if sometimes-baffling introduction to an elusive character.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Re-Memory Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2025
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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