A densely plotted, absorbing murder mystery set in a vibrant landscape.
In this mystery series entry, an Alaskan police squad dives into a decades-old homicide case with few clues to go on.
The Alaska Investigation Bureau’s Cold Case Unit often concentrates on “solvables”—cases that could be easily closed, for example, with new DNA tests. However, Annie Brewster wants her team to proactively solve a more difficult case, so they focus on a case from 20 years ago. The corpses of two Indigenous Inupiat men—Bertram Tusroyuk and his cousin Freddy Nanatooluk—were found wrapped in sheets, and an unidentified White man’s body was discovered stuffed inside a mattress. Astonishingly, the investigators back then didn’t consider these to be murders, as the bodies showed no signs of trauma, though the cops did collect some items they found near the mattress as evidence. Annie and the team, including new partner Arturo Felize, have just a few clues, including a mysterious key and what appears to be a partial page of a book. It’s up to them to gather DNA and prints; interview relevant people such as the cop who inspected the original scene; and identify the John Doe. Annie surmises that the cases are murders and that their killer may have murdered others. As in the first installment, Just Politics (2021), Nancy Buell, with Bill Buell, develops an assiduously detailed investigation. Annie picks apart and pieces together evidence until it makes sense; and even when the team has a suspect, she keeps working for the strongest possible case. The authors include spoiler-heavy nods to the earlier novel as well as a separate investigation into missing girls, which stays mostly on the back burner. Alaska, in this book, is shown to be about much more than snow; the narrative unfolds in the spring and summer as Annie passes lush greenery and enjoys breezy walks with her beloved, Fred, and their dog, Bones: “Annie didn’t think about anything but the dog, the green trees, the creek that glistened in the afternoon sun below them, and the amazing mountains in the background.” Despite a gratifying resolution, some plot threads hint at another installment.
A densely plotted, absorbing murder mystery set in a vibrant landscape.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73755-797-5
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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