Not as powerful as Tom Thorne’s caseload, but it goes down a lot easier.
Readers shocked by the downbeat ending of What the Night Brings (2025) will be happy to know things are brighter in DS Declan Miller’s Blackpool than in DI Tom Thorne’s London.
Brighter, of course, is a relative term. Shortly after Barry Cheshire’s dachshund, Ruby, is threatened by a stranger’s bulldog in Claremont Park, the stranger is fished out of the park’s pond and identified as Ezra Simmons. Everyone assumes the drowning was accidental except for Miller, who’s intrigued by a gaping wound to the man’s head. While everyone argues about whether Simmons, a drug dealer seriously in debt to another dealer, was murdered, someone knocks on Barry Cheshire’s door and fatally stabs Darren Grant, the lover who’d moved in with Stacey Cheshire, while her estranged husband sleeps through it all in the basement. Now that he has at least one incontestable homicide to deal with, Miller finds time in between his relentlessly snarky comments to his partner, DS Sara Xiu; their boss, DI Tim Sullivan; and every potential witness to focus on the crime family run by Jacqui Cutler while her husband, Wayne, languishes in prison, sent there largely by his wife’s testimony. Jacqui is so brutal at running JMC Ltd. and its affiliated tentacles that readers might be tempted to cheer when her son, Justin, is kidnapped—if Justin hadn’t been so consistently critical of the family business. The quest to recover Justin Cutler in return for an unexpected ransom draws all the major players into high-stakes, multilayered conflicts before an epilogue shines the spotlight on Finn, the hero’s seriously addicted stepdaughter.
Not as powerful as Tom Thorne’s caseload, but it goes down a lot easier.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780802167354
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Crime
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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