This invigorating mystery explores the endless ways that history shapes lives.
In this thriller, a Los Angeles Police Department detective and a university professor find themselves drawn into a conspiracy-laced series of murders.
Detective Jack Bratton’s latest case involves a body in a wood chipper. A “blood-coated splinter” gives him good reason to consult with his friend Marcus Melter, a UCLA botany professor. Unexpectedly, the investigation leads both men to a second corpse, which has ties to a chemical manufacturing company. As Jack tries piecing together the evidence, someone close to the professor winds up as a murder victim. Jack and Marcus, convinced all these homicides are connected, may have stumbled on a full-blown conspiracy. This puts the two friends in peril, as someone apparently believes they know too much. Meanwhile, various subplots, with settings ranging from the early 20th century to the present day, appear throughout the book. Most of them follow the main characters’ grandparents and fathers as their activities gradually lead them to California. Though not every subplot is immediately relevant, they all somehow link to the protagonists by the end. Ritter’s taut murder mystery doubles as a smart, engaging story of causal effect. For example, seemingly trivial things, like earthworm migration in the United States and the invention of barbed wire, sometimes become the narrative focus. But these ultimately affect significant events in the characters’ lives in surprising ways. Despite the story jumping around in different time periods and countries (for example, 1941 Denmark), Ritter makes each transition unambiguous. And while it’s a delightful narrative approach, the plot stays decidedly grim; vicious assaults and deaths come at the hands of such violent characters as an Alcatraz escapee. The author’s crisp prose shines, even in describing a hit-and-run accident: “As his sausage-like fingers clawed at the floor, he heard a terrible noise, a thud, a pop, the ring of metal, and a crumbling sound as something soft rolled under his car.”
This invigorating mystery explores the endless ways that history shapes lives.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9998960-5-1
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Pacific Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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