A satisfying entry in the expanding Palm Springs–based detective series.
A desert-based duo works the case of a murdered author in Craft’s mystery novel.
Dante O’Donnell is the VIP concierge at Sunny Junket Vacation Rentals, helping his famous and wealthy guests get the most out of their stays in Palm Springs. When private eye Jazz Friendly—who previously helped Dante get out of a very tight spot—asks him to hook up a friend of a friend with a place to stay, Dante is happy to oblige. The client in question is famed, reclusive romance novelist Maude Movay, who needs a quiet hideaway where she can finish the final book in a bestselling series. Jazz loves Maude’s work, and Dante is able to set the author up with a lavish guesthouse in a gated community, with everything she needs to bang out the manuscript in a month’s time. Unfortunately, Maude—who turns out to look nothing like her author photo—ends up dead, with a cryptic final message in her typewriter: “To Jazz Friendly, my dearest chum and most devoted reader. Yours forever, Maude Movay.” Jazz and Dante spring into action to solve the murder, which involves a massive, multimillion-dollar streaming video deal implicating a number of interested parties. When someone close to Jazz gets caught up in the crime, the case goes from high-profile whodunit to personal tragedy. The author’s prose is arch and energetic: Dante regards the dead author’s lawyer, observing, “it wasn’t just the fatigue that had taken a toll—the puffy red eyes behind her huge red glasses suggested a recent crying jag, and her twisted features made me wonder if she was on the verge of another.” It’s fun to see Craft, the author of 19 novels, plot the demise of a writer’s block–plagued author, which he does with typical ingenuity and precision. The setting and characters are well drawn, and the reader ends the novel anticipating future Dante and Jazz cases.
A satisfying entry in the expanding Palm Springs–based detective series.Pub Date: July 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798218137953
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Questover Press
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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