While slow at times, this adventure journeys to many unexpected places in the Aloha State.
A young woman investigates a mystery involving the death of a relative in this novel set in Hawaii.
Seiler presents Gina Mori, a fierce young woman whose elderly Aunt Nalani has just died. Nalani’s body was found in a sinkhole, and the circumstances surrounding her death are suspicious. Although Gina is initially sent to simply find Nalani’s missing handbag, she launches her own investigation into the tragedy. It is while Gina is tracking down the bag that she comes across Julius, a stream biologist known as Curly. He and Gina wind up forming quite a pair. Gina also has a friend in the police department, a war veteran named Carla Moreno. Moreno faces a tough time on the force, as both a rookie and a woman, but her tough-as-nails demeanor ultimately makes her well suited for the job. But even when Gina, Curly, and Moreno combine their efforts, the question remains: Who would want to kill an elderly woman? To find the answer, the three must follow a winding path through Hawaii as they gather clues. Elements as nuanced and varied as the necessity of an Environmental Impact Statement, fine dining, and satirical letters to a local newspaper all play a part. Gina, an intrepid heroine, encounters quite a cast of characters along the way. The intrigue is enhanced by the players themselves, who, at times, may not turn out to be who they say they are. While the yarn is indeed kept spinning, there are a few less-than-thrilling tangents. For instance, food often comes into play in ways that are not entirely necessary. Whether the dishes originate from a Greek van or a local cafe, characters tend to make predictable comments about the cuisine. Not much is gained by someone exclaiming “Oh, this is delicious!”—particularly when there is a possible murder to solve. Nevertheless, even with all the disparate parts, everything manages to smoothly come together in the end.
While slow at times, this adventure journeys to many unexpected places in the Aloha State.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947003-68-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Owl House Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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