The whole shebang is so propulsive you’ll hardly care about the identity of the detective’s final, and forgettable, quarry.
A second oddball outing for DS Declan Miller, still literally haunted by the murder of his wife that hung over his debut in The Last Dance (2023).
When you’ve hired a hit man to eliminate a troublesome target, it’s only natural that you’d want proof of death, right? So gang leader Wayne Cutler, who’s already battling former drag queen Ralph Massey for control of Blackpool’s underworld, has asked Dennis Draper (not his real name) to bring him a briefcase with the ringed, severed hands of the late George Panaides. These best-laid plans are torpedoed by Andy Bagnall, a thief-in-training who nicks the briefcase while Draper’s in a public washroom and then, horrified by his discovery of its contents, abjectly presents it to Miller. Miller, already suspecting Cutler of complicity in the death of his wife, Alex—who continues to pop up in disconcerting contexts and launch conversations with him—would love to use this unexpected gift to bring Cutler down, perhaps with the help of Finn, Alex’s homeless daughter. While he’s trying to do that, though, Cutler, unaware that the evidence he wanted is already in the hands of Serious and Organised Crime, calls in Martin “Torchy” Molineux, an even more fearsome killer, to retrieve it by leaning hard on Draper, on Andy, and on Andy’s sister, Natalie, a nurse at Victoria Hospital. Although the tone of these nonstop shenanigans is never exactly lighthearted, their frantic pace, the ineptness of both cops and robbers, and the constant habit of many characters of sizing up their self-performative personas make it never less than madcap.
The whole shebang is so propulsive you’ll hardly care about the identity of the detective’s final, and forgettable, quarry.Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780802163097
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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