The ambience of a Golden Age detective story with a thrilling twist of espionage.
As whispers of war fill the air in 1935 England, certain members of the upper class remain smitten with the Nazi regime.
Judge Eliot Waring drops a bombshell on his daughter Sophy: Her stepmother, Emilie, has left him for the architect planning their new home. Sophy spills the beans to her sister, Gizi, who’s her complete opposite: Sophy is practical, while Gizi is chasing aristocratic men alongside her friend Dee Malpas. Dee’s dad might be in trade and Jewish, but he’s also wealthy, and that money has gained her a new fiancé. Sophy’s older brother, Sam, who lives in Berlin, and their cousin, Alexei, a clever teen who lives with them, still need to be told about Emilie’s desertion. But the day after Dee’s engagement party at Falquonroy, her family’s home, it becomes clear that Emilie isn’t going anywhere, since her dog has found her dead body on the spot where the Warings’ new house was supposed to be built. DCI Herbert Reardon’s team includes London-based DS Tom Jago, who’s in the area quietly investigating Oswald Mosley’s fascist followers. The architect denies any plans to run off with Emilie, and though the judge might have enemies from his years on the bench, why would someone kill his departing wife? Reardon and Jago hope that a packet of photos found in Emilie’s handbag—which had gone missing but then turned up at Falquonroy—will help illuminate her mysterious past. When Sam arrives home, having quit his job in Germany over the Nazi threat, he recognizes Jago as a friend from university days. Sophy and Jago, who start to develop more than just a working relationship, recognize that it may take all their combined knowledge to find a killer.
The ambience of a Golden Age detective story with a thrilling twist of espionage.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781448316007
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.
Romance novelist Finlay Donovan, who’s never met a line she wouldn’t cross, crosses several new ones in her attempt to prove her nanny/best friend’s innocence of theft.
The good news is that Veronica Ramirez isn’t in jail despite the evidence against her of pocketing the substantial profits from her college sorority Kappa Gamma’s weekly succession of illegal gambling nights. The bad news begins with the fact that she’s under house arrest in the custody of her mother, Norma, who vociferously disapproves of Vero’s unplanned Atlantic City wedding to her boyfriend, Javi. Then there’s the fact that her sorority sisters, headed by former president and recent graduate Mia and current vice president Ava, have closed ranks in giving damning evidence against her. No wonder Vero and Norma have been the recipients of an unrelenting barrage of anonymous and often disgusting threats. Oh, and don’t forget that small-time bookie Theo Sideris, Vero’s alibi witness because they were sharing a bed at the time, has gone AWOL. Searching for him in a frantic attempt to clear Vero’s name ends up implicating virtually every other member of the cast in one crime or another and pretty much guarantees that by the time the charge of theft against Vero has finally been dismissed, she and Finn will have plenty of other brand-new charges to contend with. Fans of Cosimano’s overcaffeinated franchise can only pray that Finn will return safely to the arms of her own improbable lover, police detective Nick Anthony, so that she can concentrate on supplying her agent, Sylvia Barr, with steamy chapters of her new novel.
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781250337597
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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