An entertaining whodunit with a razor-sharp, indelible cast and series potential.
A body turning up at a vast Pennsylvania estate ignites investigations from police and amateurs alike in this debut murder mystery.
Louise Jenkins agrees to host a local event at her centuries-old ancestral home. The Bucks County Historical Society’s annual house and garden tour draws a crowd of guests ready to mingle and sip bubbly. But the party comes to an abrupt end when someone stumbles on a body in the pantry. Neither Louise nor her three grown children know the victim, Michael Porter, who died from blunt force trauma. Cops tie the homicide to drugs and a later overdose. They’re convinced that Porter had been a dealer despite his fiancee’s insistence that he stayed away from drugs. Louise’s daughter Amelia Halliday certainly believes the detectives have missed something. She was an investigative reporter in Los Angeles before a relationship with one of her sources got her sacked. She’s now freelancing in her hometown and determined to solve the murder that happened in her mother’s house. Amelia isn’t the only amateur sleuth on the case; 11-year-old Winnie Miller, whose parents help manage Louise’s estate, scours for clues as well. This brilliant and animated tween’s impressive observational skills come in handy as she inches closer to the real culprit. In fact, she and Amelia seem to be making someone nervous, as they spot strangers following them. And since a handful of people have a possible involvement in Porter’s murder, along with a mounting pile of associated crimes, danger could spring from anywhere—even a familiar face.
The narrative’s leisurely pace echoes a cozy mystery, though Leonhauser’s story is a bit too edgy for that subgenre. Still, both of the gumshoes work at their own pace, and Amelia picks up most of her evidence simply from people approaching her with information. It’s nevertheless a delight to watch them slowly unravel the mystery. Winnie even puts items she finds in her “evidence box,” things that may or may not help unmask a killer. She’s just one member of a vibrant cast; there’s also Ruth Richards, Louise’s funny, sometimes cheeky lifelong best friend, as well as Tony Mardi, the good-natured chief detective who was Amelia’s college boyfriend. Intrigue colors the backstories, too, such as the missing man who briefly owned Louise’s estate, threw wild, extravagant parties, and promptly vanished a year ago. The author keeps the spotlight on the characters with a relatively simple mystery; readers get at least a few answers well before Amelia and Winnie do, and what’s left isn’t terribly hard to crack. But a few deductions aren’t convincing; one detective doesn’t think Porter’s place is “a drug dealer’s apartment” on account of the “secondhand” furniture and “worn, inexpensive” clothing brands. At the same time, it’s realistic that Amelia continually reworks or questions her ongoing theories. Occasional clues turn out to be red herrings—a murder-mystery staple. The final act of the tale, which could easily spawn a sequel, amps up suspense as one of the vivacious heroes finds herself in peril and a guilty baddie vows to get away scot-free.
An entertaining whodunit with a razor-sharp, indelible cast and series potential.Pub Date: May 31, 2023
ISBN: 9798987288108
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Twin Beeches Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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