While the mystery tends to take a back seat, this tale offers a winning wintry ride.
A professional organizer adds solving a murder to her to-do list in this resort community cozy.
When the main character in Feliz’s sixth Maggie McDonald Mystery agrees to help ready a friend’s Lake Tahoe ski cabin for sale, slipping over a frozen body buried in the snow outside the garage isn’t part of the plan. Dev Bailey, always known as a “chill guy,” is now an ice-cold corpse. He had been missing for months, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Leslie, and their two preschool kids. Dev was a neighbor of Maggie’s friend Tess Olmos. She enlisted Maggie in her capacity of professional organizer to help clean her vacation home before listing it for sale. Contrary to public opinion that Dev was “everyone’s favorite neighbor,” it appears someone felt otherwise, as his autopsy reveals broken bones, bruises, and death by head injury. Maggie soon comes up with a list of possible suspects, including Leslie’s ex-lover, the unlikely named businessperson Walter Raleigh; former class clown and current snowplow driver Ryan Stillwell; and gruff shopkeeper Jens Zimmer, “who can’t get along with anyone for more than a few minutes.” Even the deceased’s younger sister, Amrita, working as a nanny for the Bailey children, seems dodgy, especially because of her recent baffling behavior. Feliz’s mysteries are always a welcome read. The cast of characters she’s created—Maggie and her family, friends, neighbors, and dogs—slides easily in and out of the series’ half-dozen mysteries. Unlike the first five books, this story takes place in the frosty mountains, four hours away from Maggie’s Silicon Valley home. The author nails the terror of driving in blizzard conditions, the joy of snuggling under puffy quilts, and the winter desire for “food, fire, a little booze.” Particularly charming are the ways Maggie finds to entertain Dev’s young children when she offers to babysit. Although a crime is the hook for the book, friendship and neighborliness are its core.
While the mystery tends to take a back seat, this tale offers a winning wintry ride.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5161-0531-1
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Lyrical Underground
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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