Far from a plagiarism itself, but a sad disappointment after its hero’s splendid debut.
English librarian Roland Wilkes is back for another round of golden age pastiche/valentine/deconstruction.
Dunkley councillor Jemma Soulby, the president of the Hopewell Players, wants the troupe to mount a production of Death for Dessert, a whodunit by her father, semifamous Captain Othniel James Soulby, who’s been dead for 20 years. The only problem is that the play, which sounds a lot like a six-character version of Agatha Christie’s immortal And Then There Were None, is wretched. Solicitor Adam Cunningham, a longtime member of the Players, doesn’t want to confront the Iron Spinster without reinforcements, so in addition to urging his fellow thespians to reject the play, he offers Roly £300 to write a critique of it that raises the possibility of plagiarism. The editor turned librarian, who had experience with a metafictional plot in his first outing—Buried Above Ground (2025)—dutifully savages the play and catalogs its borrowings. This would give Adam the perfect opportunity to have a word with Jemma if he weren’t dead, found hanged in the theater by social worker and stage manager Bryn Brookes and assistant stage manager Nicholas Smith, who also reviews plays under the fragrant pen name Theophilus Keene. It’s a great setup, and Ripley enlivens DI Toni Walker’s questioning of the Players by allowing each of them endless backbiting against the others. But there’s too much missing to make this the equal of Roly’s first case, most notably any clear sense of what made Death for Dessert any worse than hundreds of other derivative whodunits. The solution is fair but not especially ingenious, and the appended notes pointing out all the references to earlier golden age puzzles are distinctly anticlimactic.
Far from a plagiarism itself, but a sad disappointment after its hero’s splendid debut.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781448317684
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
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
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