A notable mystery with a complex, believable, and insightful protagonist.
A transgender teenager in the American South delves into a murder case in Maroney’s novel.
As the story opens, a trio of outcasts settles in a Southern town after inheriting the house of a recently deceased relative. They include Nancy, a single mother who works as a stripper to make ends meet; her 10-year-old son, Howell, who’s been developing a hustle as a boy preacher and tends to speak in scriptural quotations; and his 16-year-old sister, Hart, who’s the novel’s moral and emotional center. Maroney describes, with painful accuracy, the uncomfortable attention she constantly receives, whether it’s from boys at her high school or from strangers: “Hart felt the usual little twist in her guts that happened when men she didn’t know paid her compliments she wasn’t sure what to do with.” Then, one day, the family dog discovers a human hand, and soon Hart confronts the ghastly remains of a young woman’s corpse: “Without lips, the smile was as wide as a beauty queen’s. The eyes were gone, taken to the air by birds. The sockets seemed unnaturally large, dark holes surrounded by bright blue glitter that twinkled in the faint light.” The sheriff closed the case suspiciously quickly, so Hart begins to unravel a mystery that involves webcams, water contaminated by a local mining company, and meth labs. Hart’s eye is incisive and laser-sharp, as in a description of the protagonist’s peers at an environmental protest meeting: “Their teeth gave them away. Every time they opened their mouths, they displayed thousands of dollars’ worth of the best dentistry.” About halfway through the novel, readers learn that Hart is transgender, which is addressed with maturity, sensitivity, and power. As she gets closer to solving the murder mystery, Maroney dramatizes the layers of prejudice and discrimination in Southern society, particularly around gender, and how these affect the resolution of the case. The writing here is bold, combining suspenseful plot twists with social commentary, resulting in a noteworthy work of fiction that’s much more than simply a well-choreographed whodunit.
A notable mystery with a complex, believable, and insightful protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 369
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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.
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