Ripley’s best book: a wickedly funny sendup of the clichés behind all those classic mysteries and their successors.
After a dozen authorized pastiches featuring Albert Campion in his autumn years, Ripley attacks the conventions of golden age whodunits in a much more metafictional way.
Kicking off his tale with the announcement that “this is not a conventional crime novel, rather a novel about writing crime novels,” Ripley invites readers into the world of mediocre mystery writer Duncan Torrens through the eyes of Roland Wilkes, who edited his final 10 novels after Edward Jesser, the founding publisher of Boothby & Briggs, indicated that he couldn’t stand Torrens’ increasingly undistinguished fiction but couldn’t bear to cut the reclusive, uncomplaining author loose. Roly recalls his surprisingly productive relationship with Alan Hibbert, who wrote for many years under the Torrens byline without ever tipping off most of his neighbors in the Hertfordshire village of Dunkley. Their relationship lasted until B&B was acquired by a Scandinavian conglomerate that fired Roly and refused to publish the latest Torrens title. But the bottom doesn’t really fall out of Roly’s world until mystery podcaster Jacon-with-a-“C” Archer, who’s been hired by rival publisher Spencer Crow to investigate the possibility of reprinting the Torrens oeuvre on the cheap, tries to pump Roly, now a public librarian, for information about the virtually forgotten author. The kaleidoscopic revelations that follow, delivered with deadpan wit, are likely to confirm readers’ most paranoid fears about the worlds of publishing, authorship, business, and domestic relations. Ripley punctuates his story with two dozen clearly marked references to mystery writers famous and obscure that his appendix elucidates. Aficionados are likely to recognize even more that he never explains.
Ripley’s best book: a wickedly funny sendup of the clichés behind all those classic mysteries and their successors.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781448315611
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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