Lots of acting, lots of playing, a fair amount of meta. Happy birthday!
In this anthology, 22 members of Britain’s Detection Club gather under the banner of its current president to honor his immediate predecessor, Simon Brett, on his 80th birthday.
Edwards’ introduction indicates that he gave his contributors free rein, and many of them took him at his word. Andrew Taylor traces the consequences of four schoolmates’ discovery of a body on forbidden ground. Michael Ridpath presents a couple’s curdled revenge for an online scam. Catherine Aird revisits the 1593 murder of Christopher Marlowe, and Elly Griffiths reimagines the incident that sparked Wilkie Collins to write The Woman in White. John Harvey produces an efficient mini-procedural for Charlie Resnick. Michael Jecks’ copper crashes a funeral in order to unearth a Ponzi scheme. Frances Brody follows her hero from the acquisition of 120 Churchill Crowns—a set of commemorative coins—till his death. Abir Mukherjee does right by a wrongfully convicted rapist. Other contributors echo Brett’s work more closely. Peter Lovesey and Lynne Truss plant their crimes in the world of radio broadcasting, and Ann Cleeves, Alison Joseph, David Stuart Davies, Michael Z. Lewin, and Aline Templeton stage theirs in the theater. Brett’s best-known franchise detective, actor Charles Paris, appears in Kate Ellis’ tale of impersonation gone wrong, and Ruth Dudley Edwards’ resourceful hero seems a lot like Brett himself. L.C. Tyler and Christopher Fowler push Brett’s antic wit even further, and editor Edwards pushes anagrams to their limit. Liza Cody provides a triple haiku just 39 words long. The last and longest story is by Brett himself, not to be outdone, who plays on the title of his first novel, Cast, in Order of Disappearance, in another Charles Paris misadventure that rings down the curtain with an appropriate anticlimax.
Lots of acting, lots of playing, a fair amount of meta. Happy birthday!Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781448312962
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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