An inventive fantasia with murder more or less on the side.
Two tipplers at a suburban London pub take ignoring the other patrons to a new level when they almost fail to notice that the man sitting between them has been shot to death.
Lloyd Pruitt, The Queen’s bartender and owner, hears a popping noise, and that’s it before the victim, identified as wealthy distiller Thomas Treadnor, falls to the floor. He’s been shot in the back by someone wielding a shotgun and presumably stationed outside The Queen, whose outdoor sign Pruitt is incensed to discover a graffiti artist has just renamed The Red Queen. Since Treadnor knew the police commissioner, Det. Supt. Richard Jury is called in to take the case away from the Twickenham division. He discovers that Treadnor was both loved and hated—sometimes both at once—by members of his household, from Alice, the wife he was divorcing, to Rufus Stewert, the stableman he employed even though he was no horseman himself. The case is complicated by three developments. One is Jury’s realization that Jason Lederer, the chief financial officer at a local travel agency, was the spitting image of Treadnor. Another is the interruption of the investigation by Jury’s partner DS Alfie Wiggins’ sudden need to hurry to Manchester, where he embarks on an extended, wildly improbable search for his sister, Betty Jean, who vanished five years ago. The third and most characteristic is Jury’s periodic adjournments to banter with everyone from his old friend Melrose Plant, whom he persuades to do a bit of undercover work, to Tommy Treadnor, the namesake child who’s one of the few people whose grief for his great-uncle is unqualified.
An inventive fantasia with murder more or less on the side.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164940
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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