A searing mystery that examines the connections between power and privilege as they play out in a missing-person case.
In Murphy’s mystery, a Georgia detective must overcome past traumas to unlock the secrets behind a surgeon’s disappearance.
Dr. Janie O’Connor vanished before her shift started at a local hospital, and as Savannah Police Det. Frank Winger investigates, he confronts numerous challenges. He and his partner, Det. Pepper Stephens, delve into Janie’s relationship with billionaire “Playboy Phil” Carruthers and quickly discover that he had a controlling side that prompted Janie to call off their wedding; she also rekindled her romance with an old flame, Dr. David Wommack, shortly before she disappeared. Carruthers becomes a prime suspect after the detectives learn that his security chief assaulted Janie’s sister, Diane, and tried to kill Wommack by setting his front porch ablaze. The later discovery of Janie’s remains, due to an anonymous tip, seemingly seals Carruthers’ fate, even as his sister, Erika, stoutly dismisses the idea that he would commit such a crime. As the investigation moves forward, however, Winger comes to realize that Carruthers isn’t the only person hiding secrets. The attempted suicide of a Carruthers Enterprises employee, John Straub, throws the case into a whole new realm—one that involves human trafficking and the murders of a young boy and his mother, allegedly by a giant alligator: “For Carruthers Enterprises employees, this was their Loch Ness Monster.” As Winger revisits previous steps in the investigation, the revelation of missing evidence jolts him into accepting a shattering conclusion about the power of Carruthers’ forces, whose reach seems boundless.
Police Chief Clarence “Gatehouse” Brown is also keeping secrets, which may explain his initial reluctance to approve basic steps, such as searching a home (“What the hell is he afraid of? Frank thought”). The twists don’t end there, however. What initially seems like an excursion into Chinatown-style noir, leading inevitably to one suspect’s doorstep, gives way to an explosive, unanticipated journey through the heart of coastal Georgia society. Over the course of the narrative, readers will find that Murphy’s novel presents an extensive meditation on wealth and power, superbly underpinned by the author’s vivid establishment of atmosphere and setting. Along the way, Winger learns that Rose Dhu, the wealthy neighborhood whose name provides the novel’s title, is an area that has a great many ghosts in its past; it’s a place where the sight of bloodstains at an abandoned house is seen as a reason for outsiders to mind their own business, rather than investigate wrongdoing. As readers will discover, what lurks underneath Rose Dhu’s glossy, sophisticated veneer is a terrible evil, indeed, and it’s a theme that will surely resonate with many readers, amid contemporary social and political debates about how some ultrawealthy people find it easier to surrender to their worst urges, rather than check them. The ways that Winger strives to sweep aside local power structures will stick in readers’ minds, long after he, and Murphy, has tied up the case’s frustrating loose ends.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781967510702
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Girl Friday Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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