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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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