Ruhlman and Headen draft an outstanding crew of writers to chronicle the misery of folks who can’t get out of their own ways.
Fifteen new tales of murder and mayhem as diverse as the city that spawned them.
How could a city whose main waterway once burned for 20 minutes, with flames reaching as high as five stories, deny its flair for the dramatic? Ruhlman and Headen populate this volume with a host of colorful characters who’d rule the world if they didn’t trip over their own feet. Take Caro, the hero of Abby L. Vandiver’s “Sugar Daddy,” who tries to run some game but ends up a chump. Or Gwen and Ally, two girls from Settler’s Landing who have a sweet con going in ritzy Bratenahl until they don’t, in Paula McLain’s “Love Always.” Susan Petrone tells the tale of a sportswriter who gets the interview of a lifetime but fails spectacularly to capitalize on it in “The Silent Partner.” So does Calvin, journalist hero of Dana McSwain’s “Bus Stop,” who has the very specialized gift of speaking to young female murder victims years after their demises but can’t bring them justice. Perhaps the saddest tale here is Angela Crook’s “Bitter,” which describes how the need for revenge can blot out years of hard-earned success. On the flip side, years of profitable petty chiseling can so quickly turn on their heads in editor Headen’s “The Book of Numbers.” Roxanne, in editor Ruhlman’s “The Ultimate Cure,” doesn’t so much bring destruction upon herself as blunder into it—unlike rock star Anders in Daniel Stashower’s “Lenny, but Not Corky,” who can’t wait to discover disaster on his own doorstep.
Ruhlman and Headen draft an outstanding crew of writers to chronicle the misery of folks who can’t get out of their own ways.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781636140995
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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