A feverish story that effectively turns neo-noir conventions on its head.
In Litchfield’s 1950s-set thriller, a Chicago fixer nearly meets his match during a hunt for a rare necklace.
Trouble is never far away for Ray Stokes, a veteran problem-solver whose leisure activities revolve around stiff drinks and attractive but inscrutable women. However, Ray’s boss, Walter Cartwell, isn’t one to let his top performer lie fallow. He’s fixated on a rare piece of jewelry—a rare necklace, found long ago by Jamaican marine explorer Herman Hessman, which later disappeared from a museum; Walter believes that a church secretary in Boston named Merriam Woodcroft has it, and he hires Ray in a frenzied quest to obtain it, so that he can verify its authenticity. At first, Ray wants no part of the assignment, which seems too pedestrian for his hedonistic mindset. But Cartwell has other ideas, and his iron will prevails (“Let Walter down at your peril; he wasn't the forgiving type”). The trip leads Ray to Arnold Sinclair, a philandering pastor who may be dealing in more than mere donations. Complications don’t take long to ensue, especially after Ray wins the confidence of Arnold’s bedmate, Merriam. It’s the type of premise that will sound very familiar to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler aficionados, which is a feature, not a bug. Litchfield knows this territory well, dishing out suitably snarky asides on human nature: “She was a job, nothing more.” In keeping with that brief, the prose style is lean, but with all the zingers that the genre demands—whether it’s local riffraff eyeing Ray’s car “like fireflies to a porch light” or a compliment that hits Merriam “like a bumper car.” Every detail seems relevant, and not a syllable seems wasted—a tough trick to pull off. It all results in an appealing tale that also upends stereotypical impressions of ’50s Americana.
A feverish story that effectively turns neo-noir conventions on its head.Pub Date: June 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781732332850
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Lowestoft Chronicle Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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