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THE PUZZLE OF BLACKSTONE LODGE

A triple-decker banquet honoring the golden age of mysteries and bidding fair to continue it to the present.

Or, more exactly, “puzzles,” since the Yorkshire site of the title is the scene of a series of baffling mysteries stretching back 300 years.

Asked in 1930 by British Museum clerk Vernon Murray to look into the suspicious death of his mother, Ursula, while she was a patient in Blackstone Sanatorium, journalist Nell Fagan leans into her own network for help. Her colleague and friend Jacob Flint is willing to tear himself away from his investigation of two potentially fake mediums to help ask questions about professor Wilfred Sambrook, the alienist who bought Blackstone Lodge from Harold Lejeune, whose family had owned it for centuries, and founded the sanatorium. But Rachel Savernake, the wealthy star investigator Nell approaches, is less willing. All the locals know that back in 1606, Edmund Mellor, a guest of Blackstone’s very first owner, entered the lodge, locked the door behind him, and vanished, and that Harold’s brother, Alfred Lejeune, repeated the trick in 1914. But new developments come thick as hasty pudding. Vernon Murray dies in a convenient accident in the London Underground. Nell uncovers a string of untimely deaths of Blackstone patients. When Nell herself vanishes and Rachel finally agrees to take over the case, it turns out to have more courses than a tasting menu. Readers who aren’t already reeling from the string of climactic revelations will be properly chastened by the appended Cluefinder, in which Edwards, borrowing still one more page from the past, reminds them of all the evidence they overlooked along the way.

A triple-decker banquet honoring the golden age of mysteries and bidding fair to continue it to the present.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023

ISBN: 9781728271040

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB

From the Thursday Murder Club series , Vol. 1

A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.

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Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.

The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.

A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.

Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020

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