Good fun for Spenser’s legion of fans.
Murder begets paternity questions and more murder in this latest Spenser case.
In Boston, private detective Spenser meets young Daniel Lopez, whose Guatemalan immigrant mother, Marisol, was murdered six weeks ago in Miami. “It has come to my attention, Mr. Spenser,” he says, “that a lot of my life story turned out to be a lie.” Because of a DNA test, Daniel thinks he is the unacknowledged son of Vic Hale, voice of the right-wing, anti-immigrant Boston podcast All Hale. Thought to be the next biggest podcaster after Joe Rogan, Hale hates anyone who doesn’t look like him. “King of the mouth-breathers,” says Spenser’s colleague Hawk. An “awful, awful man,” says Susan Silverman. Daniel, who is on his way to Harvard Law School, simply wants Hale to acknowledge his paternity and insists he doesn’t want money. Hale refuses. More people wind up dead, and a bigger and more complicated story develops that ends in a showdown. Spenser, of unknown first name, is the classic creation of the late Robert B. Parker. He’s tall, great-looking, and loyal to Susan, his psychologist girlfriend and always-eager sex partner. Lawyer Rita Fiore calls him “the Incredible Hunk,” but she respects that he’s spoken for. Setting the series apart is the smart dialogue that’s often good for a chuckle—though the plots are always serious, Spenser misses few opportunities to flaunt his wit. Occasionally, it grates on his enemies, and even readers may roll their eyes at his constant efforts to be funny or make arcane literary references. Reflecting on the strength he once had, he conjures Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “When I was young?—Ah, woful When!...Ah! for the change ‘twixt Now and Then…” But that’s a noir P.I. for you: tough and handsome, erudite and wiseass. Meanwhile, Hawk is not shy about poking fun at his friend and ally’s quirks. Author Lupica faithfully maintains the atmosphere and characters that Parker created.
Good fun for Spenser’s legion of fans.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798217045297
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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