The real star of this show is Paterson, which feels as menacing, vivid, and multilayered as Walter Mosley’s Watts.
A patrol officer hungry for advancement gets his first shot at detective work in 1979 Paterson, New Jersey.
As they’re closing down RJ’s Taproom after another routine night, co-owner Randall Low and waitress/dancer Cindy Kaczorek are shot to death. Their killer escapes without touching the cash register, leaving the Paterson Police Department to wonder whether something interrupted a planned robbery or the motive was something entirely different. Sgt. Gregg Bachman, who’s been handed the case, calls on Officer Jamie Palmieri to help out. Jamie’s job is to tag along on interviews, take careful notes, and keep a sharp eye out for anything Bachman might miss. After three years working patrol shifts, Jamie jumps at the chance to stretch his wings, and he proves his value by picking up the clues that lead to further witnesses. But none of them, from Connie De Carlo, Cindy’s high school drama teacher, to Sandy Santasiera, Cindy’s best friend, can explain why Cindy was shot before Randall Low. The most likely suspect—Cindy’s boyfriend, Brad Rogan—was in jail at the time of the shooting. And the apparently unrelated murder of Drew Steinle demands investigation by a unit that’s already overworked. The killer, who knows better than Jamie that the walls are closing in on him, follows the officer’s flashy car around and tracks him to the house his Aunt Ro left him, where he plans an attack on Jamie and Missy Hollum, the bar pickup he’s taken under his roof. The mystery isn’t that mysterious, but debut novelist Anagnos sweats so many procedural details of Jamie’s painstaking investigation that you’ll sweat along with him.
The real star of this show is Paterson, which feels as menacing, vivid, and multilayered as Walter Mosley’s Watts.Pub Date: June 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781962931151
Page Count: 322
Publisher: High Frequency Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
