A charming and delightful cozy whodunit that will leave fans eager for the next installment.
Larkin Day returns in the second entry in Dieker’s mystery series, following Ode to Murder (2022).
After solving her first case, grad student Larkin is considering going into business as a private detective for hire and making Pratincola, Iowa—a Cedar Rapids suburb—her permanent home. Still living in her mother’s guest bedroom, she’s eager to make a fresh start in the new year. Her first case is the online “murder” of Bonnie Cooper, a fitness instructor and influencer who’s alive and well but whose social media, email, and cellphone accounts have been mysteriously erased from existence: “About as murdered as you can be without being dead,” as Bonnie describes it. Larkin’s job is to rescue Bonnie from this purgatory before she loses her sponsors, her subscribers, and her job at the local fitness center. Another person having career trouble is Larkin’s mother, Josephine Day, the dean at Howell College; she’s started receiving threatening messages in the form of yard signs after word gets around about her romantic relationship with police officer Claire. Larkin follows a social media trail to track down her culprits, but her personal life may be the most tangled case of all. Why is she putting off filing paperwork to be an officially licensed detective? Has she given up on working in theater? How’s her tentative relationship with music professor Ed going? Does her best friend Anni have a boyfriend? Overall, this is a charming mystery that offers readers a welcome twist on the typical cozy mystery plot. If readers haven’t read the first book, the author makes it as easy as possible for them to catch up by offering plentiful references to past events. Larkin’s journey will particularly speak to millennials who find themselves navigating the problems of the baby boomers and members of Gen Z in their lives while also trying to figure things out for themselves. The cast of secondary characters is entertaining and diverse, and the pacing is brisk. Clever humor and engaging relationships keep the tone light but satisfying throughout.
A charming and delightful cozy whodunit that will leave fans eager for the next installment.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781733691970
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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