An immersive first outing for a crime-solving odd couple.
An aging concierge and a desperate private eye team up in Craft’s mystery series starter.
Fifty-something Dante O’Donnell moved to Palm Springs seven years ago, giving up a not-so-successful acting career to marry his doctor boyfriend, Anthony Gascogne. Two years ago, Anthony asked for a divorce, and a few months afterward, he was murdered in an apparent break-in. Now Dante is working for a vacation rental company, looking after properties and some of the VIP clients. While assisting a wealthy art dealer, Dante runs into Jazz Friendly, the officer who investigated Anthony’s murder. Jazz has since lost her job and is now working as a rent-a-cop, providing security for the art dealer’s merchandise while moonlighting as a private detective. Dante and Jazz hate each other—Jazz wrongly arrested Dante for his husband’s killing, which indirectly caused her to lose her job—but when Jazz saves Dante from being framed for a different crime, the two call a truce. In fact, she asks if he might be able to drum up some PI business for her among the wealthy vacationing set. Dante agrees, but when a body turns up in the swimming pool of one of his rentals, he and Jazz are thrown into a caper that’s larger than either could have expected. Craft’s prose style is dry and sharp, perfect for the desert resort milieu of the aging rich and those who make their living from them. For example, here, Dante visits Jazz’s office in the back of a coffee shop for the first time: “Taped to the inside of the glass was a makeshift sign that I recognized as a photocopy of Jazz’s business card, which had been enlarged several times….I assumed Jazz didn’t get many walk-ins.” Dante and Jazz make for an intriguing pair, as both are flawed in their own embarrassing ways, and both are searching for something to fill the voids in their lives. Craft has long been an inventive mystery writer, and this new series promises to add a bit of grit to his distinctively colorful brand of storytelling.
An immersive first outing for a crime-solving odd couple.Pub Date: May 2, 2022
ISBN: 9781954841994
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Brash Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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