A worthwhile investment for those interested in whodunits, social justice, and the work of Giuseppe Verdi.
The rarified worlds of high finance and grand opera collide in this complex murder mystery.
New York City is in the midst of a cold snap, but things heat up quickly for Devlin Wolfe, a Federal Securities and Exchange Commission investigator, after he happens upon a dead body floating in the Harlem River while rowing one morning. The “distinguished looking” stabbing victim wearing a $2,000 suit is identified as Guillaume Marchand, a financial analyst for Endicott Technologies. Things immediately get more complicated when Marchand’s $7 million estate in Westchester County is burned to the ground and his artist wife goes missing on the eve of an important gallery exhibition. Bixby Endicott, the victim’s former boss, has political ambitions and “the conviction [that] he was set apart by destiny to guide the great American experiment by reason of his ability to amass wealth.” An unexpected subplot provides an intriguing wrinkle in what could have been a cut-and-dried conspiracy thriller; it involves the mounting of a production of the opera Aida with a sensational young French diva who’s giving her debut performance in the United States. Bixby, it turns out, is a late-in-life opera convert who’s transfixed by “the impossible beauty, the unattainable grasped, at the infinite realized.” Blair, the author of Sudden Rivers (2014), writes a novel that exudes a palpable rage against dark money and ruthless puppet masters in pursuit of power. Devlin, his investigator protagonist, is certainly no fan of the rich: “Business was simply the pursuit of profit without the slightest hint of conscience...or any of the qualities that distinguished the civilized from the barbaric.” Over the course of the book, the author also does his best to make financial terms and practices accessible to the lay reader. Thierry Reynard, a police officer, acts as the reader’s surrogate as Devlin explains such concepts as “short selling.” Some of the more florid poetic passages don’t pay off as well, however: “Eidolons travel in the night: they streak above the cirrus clouds between where humans walk and phantoms linger.”
A worthwhile investment for those interested in whodunits, social justice, and the work of Giuseppe Verdi.Pub Date: March 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9894896-8-3
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Novabook Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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