Too much of a good thing. Less, please.
As war clouds gather over England, mystery writer Josephine Tey heads out to Hollywood. It’s not far enough to keep the shadows of crimes old and new from darkening her view.
Though she knows that her lover, screenwriter Marta Fox, is working with Alfred Hitchcock on Rebecca, his first American film, Josephine is surprised to meet Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife and collaborator, aboard the Queen Mary. Surprised and not altogether pleased, since the experience of having Hitchcock film her novel A Shilling for Candles under the title Young and Innocent has left memories nearly as painful as Daphne du Maurier’s consternation at what Hitchcock did to Jamaica Inn. Her journey done, Josephine settles in with Marta just as her friend DCI Archie Penrose of London’s Metropolitan Police is handed a delicate case: the fatal shooting of Evelyn Young, the housekeeper at Milton Hall, the stately manse du Maurier used as the model for Manderley. Archie’s days are more closely linked to Josephine’s than either one initially recognizes, for James Bartholomew, a member of the special effects team on Hitchcock’s film, fled England after smothering Marion Plummer, a vengeful mother who’d just told him she’d driven his love, her son, Matthew, to suicide back in 1917 during du Maurier’s childhood visit to Milton Hall. Yes, there’s more, much more. Upson does her best to juggle different crimes, scandals, time periods, subplots, crime writers, and incidental episodes from walk-on roles for Bob Hope and Clark Gable to a serious case of poison ivy, but in the end her edifice, unlike the doomed Manderley, collapses under its own weight.
Too much of a good thing. Less, please.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781639102662
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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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