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
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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