Eighty-six years on, Lowndes still presents a remarkably modern take on notoriety, guilt, and love.
Standing trial for murder is only the beginning of a new widow’s tribulations in this breathless, mournful tale the author of The Lodger originally published in 1934.
Three weeks after Dr. Grant signed a death certificate indicating that Fordish Dousland had died of natural causes, his growing unease led him to contact the Silchester police, who arrested Laura Dousland for dosing her much older husband’s wine with rat poison. The question of her innocence or guilt evidently turns on the disappearance of a flask that held the victim’s final drink. Dousland’s Venetian servant, Angelo Terugi, testifies that he placed the flask on his master’s dinner tray and that it vanished in the confusion after his death; Sir Joseph Molloy, the barrister representing Laura, suggests that Terugi is confusing the events of the fatal evening with those three weeks before, when the stingy Dousland hid the flask the servant had brought him to prevent Terugi from finishing it himself. Sir Joseph’s questions are pointed enough to raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors, and Laura is found not guilty and set free. But not all that free, since her husband’s death leaves her penniless; the publicity from the trial follows her to Loverslea, where she takes refuge with John and Alice Hayward, who introduced her to Dousland while she was working as governess for their daughter, and Alice’s well-meant kindness becomes unbearably oppressive. Hiding under her mother’s maiden name, Laura accepts the invitation of Dr. Mark Scrutton, Dousland’s golfing acquaintance, to stay in an outbuilding of his parents’ home. But she can’t accept Mark’s professions of love, which precipitate an all-too-expected ending.
Eighty-six years on, Lowndes still presents a remarkably modern take on notoriety, guilt, and love.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1546-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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: yesterday
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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