A sly reminder that “movies, like politics, are unreality. That’s the point of them.”
A posthumous novel Crichton (1942–2008) wrote in 1973 under the pseudonym John Lange, in between The Andromeda Strain and The Great Train Robbery, but left unpublished till now.
As Harvey Jason knows all too well, the life of a movie publicist is no fun. Now that he’s spent three weeks in Tucson, Arizona, for the shooting of the western Bloodrock, Harvey’s come to know every watering hole in town and every scandal among the cast and crew. Except, that is, for the scandal that threatens to break out when Arthur McDougall, the screenwriter who’s come along for possible rewrites, is found dead in his hotel bathtub. The studio head back in Hollywood preemptively dispatches insurance investigator Harlow Perkins—“a regular Sherlock Holmes”—before any of the insurance companies backing the production can hire him themselves. In short order, the dislikable Perkins lines up interviews with leading actors Clete Williams and Brenda Conrad, promiscuous second lead Sally Oldman, producer Charles Mann, director Tom Franklin, and the rest of the crew. Whoever he talks to, he’s accompanied by Harvey, shadowing him under the orders of his boss, publicity chief Sam Appelbaum, who’s far from convinced that news of the incident will be bad for business. The characters are no more memorable than Colonel Mustard or Miss Scarlet, but Crichton, as in the SF novels that would make him famous, sweats every detail of the background, and aspiring filmmakers will learn as much about the mechanics of moviemaking as they could from most film textbooks. If you think the big reveal falls flat, just keep on reading to the end.
A sly reminder that “movies, like politics, are unreality. That’s the point of them.”Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9798212514309
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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