A heartfelt procedural that isn’t afraid to sweat the details.
A young Colorado girl’s disappearance raises agonizing questions for her estranged parents and for the detective spearheading the search for her.
Lena Flores is only 11—too young to be in danger of seriously misbehaving but not too young to have decided when her parents divorced five years ago that she wanted to live with her father. Now, on a weekend she's supposed to be staying with her mother, ER nurse Tilda Marquet, she doesn't show up to her 4-H assignment at the local fair, and Tilda can’t find her. Her ex-husband, veterinarian Lucero Flores, insists that he didn’t pick her up, and Marisa Flores, the daughter who lives with Tilda, has been too busy juggling her high school romances and pursuing her dreams of being an entrepreneurial influencer to have seen what happened to her kid sister. Detective Jo Wyatt swings into action even though most of her superiors in the Echo Valley Police Department are convinced that the girl has just wandered off and will come back home when she’s hungry. When it gradually becomes clear that Lena’s vanishing is anything but routine, Jo, who’s reluctant to accept the politically motivated promotion to sergeant she’s been offered by incoming Chief William Prather, focuses on several obvious suspects. Aaron Tingler, a new deliveryman for the Valley Courier, has just come off probation for burglary. Peeping Tom Sebastian Vescent is a registered sex offender who broke parole to move into his aunt’s house in the neighborhood. And Lucero himself has a history of violence. After sifting through these mostly uninspired candidates, Browning comes up with a solution that’s as disturbing as it is surprising.
A heartfelt procedural that isn’t afraid to sweat the details.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64385-762-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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