Miller offers a romantic mystery that dives deep into Long Island history.
Luce Porter is a TV producer whose tongue is as sharp as her wit. She’s had her share of romantic missteps, and at this point, no man can get under her skin—well, almost no man. Andy Holman, a gorgeous New York City police detective who arrested her for a minor infraction 10 years prior, still manages to push her buttons. He uses personal connections to score invites for Luce and her TV crew—including her new intern, Kat Downing—to the Annual Ghost Ship Mystery Dinner, hosted by eccentric society matriarch Adeline Bowers on Long Island Sound. They learn about “the Phantom,” aka the MorningStar, a ship that vanished off the coast of Long Island in 1790, allegedly resulting in the deaths of all but one of the passengers onboard. It’s contents and purpose were unknown, but clues suggest that it was involved in the slave trade. Many people have claimed sightings of the vessel over the years. As Luce and Andy try to unravel the mystery of the MorningStar, they run into people who are determined to bury the truth—and possibly anyone standing in their way. Miller presents a tightly written mystery that will keep readers guessing as well as a romance that’s full of sassy banter and sexual tension. But her novel offers much more, as she bases the story on the actual history of the Execution Rocks Light, a lighthouse with a complicated legacy, and reveals uncommon knowledge about the North’s involvement in the buying and selling of enslaved people. It also addresses disability-related issues that Kat, who uses a wheelchair, faces in her daily life. Overall, Miller delivers a story that’s substantial and relevant despite its lighthearted moments. Some may find the resolution of Luce and Andy’s romance unsatisfying, but the happy ending will have readers excited for a potential sequel.
An enjoyable and intriguing novel that will keep readers engaged until the final page.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73610-110-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Pendant Cove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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Emerson’s striking debut follows a Navajo police photographer almost literally to hell and back.
Rita Todacheene sees dead people. Since most of her attempts to talk to someone about her special power while she was growing up on the reservation ended in disaster, she’s tried to keep it to herself during her five years with the Albuquerque Police Department. Her precarious peace is shattered by the death of Erma Singleton, manager of a bar owned by Matias Romero, her common-law husband. Although lazy Detective Martin Garcia has ruled that Erma fell from a highway bridge, her body shattered by the truck that hit her on the roadway below, Erma insists that she was pushed from the bridge. “Help me get back to my baby,” she tells Rita, “or I’ll make your life a living hell.” Since Rita, a civilian employee, has few resources for an investigation, Erma opens a portal that unleashes scores of ghosts on her, all clamoring for justice or mercy or a few words with the loved ones they left behind. The nightmare that propels Rita forward, from snapping photos of Judge Harrison Winters and his wife and children and dog, all shot dead in what Garcia calls a murder-suicide, to revelations that link both these deaths and Erma’s to the drug business of the Sinaloa cartel, is interleaved with repeated flashbacks that show the misfit Rita’s early years on her Navajo reservation and in her Catholic grade school as she struggles to come to terms with a gift that feels more like a curse. The appeal of the case as a series kickoff is matched by the challenges Emerson will face in pulling off any sequels.
A whodunit upstaged at every point by the unforgettably febrile intensity of the heroine’s first-person narrative.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29333-4
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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