An intense and satisfying whodunit.
A mystery sequelset in the fictional Oregon coastal town of Misty Pines.
As the story opens, FBI profiler Abby Kanekoa is on a frantic search for her missing mother who has Alzheimer’s disease. After an exhaustive search of her parent’s usual haunts, Abby finds her covered in blood on the beach. However, her mother isn’t injured; she’s holding someone’s tennis shoe—inside of which is a severed foot. That foot, in turns out, belongs to local surfer legend and unique board designer Terry Chesney—and the rest of him is missing. Abby and local sheriff Jax Turner, who’ve been separated for several years after the death of their young daughter, are brought together by the case along with Jax’s 27-year-old niece, Rachel Killian, who’s new to the police force. Chesney’s local surf shop is responsible for surfboard designs that his competitors covet; however, they’re not the only suspects in the disappearance, and possible death, of the mysterious surf pro. Keliikoa has crafted a page-turning second series installment; Abby is a fully fleshed-out character, and the mystery is one that readers will be truly invested in seeing through to the end. The well-paced story offers engaging commentary on the trials of women in law enforcement while avoiding clichés and common tropes. The emotional pain of child loss that Abby and Jax suffer was present in the first installment, and here it’s effectively used to show the long-term effects of loss on relationships. The author’s descriptions of the atmosphere of the Oregon coast may leave readers longing for more: “The sound of the ocean played off the cliffs below and wafted the steady roar into the air….Slices of cobalt sky peeked through the thinning trees.” Still, for a novel whose mystery centers on a legendary surf pro and board designer, the surf settings are oddly sparse. Nonetheless, the novel will leave readers looking forward to the next series entry.
An intense and satisfying whodunit.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781685122799
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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