Two mysteries plotted with an eye for the details of both subjects set this series apart.
After genetic testing suggests that a young woman’s family may not be who they say they are, her investigation into the past is interrupted by a local wildlife emergency.
Twenty-seven years ago, a young mother on the Eastern Shore of Maryland chose to place her infant on a minister’s doorstep rather than let the baby be sold by her cruel partner to “a loathsome couple from Baltimore.” After leaving the baby with only a note reading “My name is Noel,” the girl vanished into the night. In the present day, Noel Sinclair runs into Hannah Ives, whose grandchildren she used to babysit. Hannah says she’s been busy “building family trees from DNA data that’s been uploaded to recreational databases like Ancestry, 23andMe and GenTree” to help the police solve crimes. Noel soon shares the results of a recent DNA test she and her sister both took, which suggest that they aren’t even remotely related. Given her knack for diligent investigation, Hannah wants to help Noel figure out what’s going on, so she dives into the rabbit hole that is genealogical research. The two women also spend time catching up with each other at Our Song, the vacation cottage Hannah recently bought with her husband. As Hannah shows Noel some bald eagles there, the women spot a set of birds that seem to have gotten sick from eating a dead fox. But when they bring the birds to Hoots, the local bird rescue, it begins to look like someone deliberately poisoned the fox with carbofuran and that the birds may have died as a result. Now that Hannah and Noel are focusing on the question of who might want to poison local wildlife, Hannah leads the investigative charge with her meticulous research and ability to fly under the radar, hoping, like Noel, to find a happy resolution before more animals become victims.
Two mysteries plotted with an eye for the details of both subjects set this series apart.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781448307975
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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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