A truly exceptional detective and a first-rate supporting cast kindle this straightforward mystery.
An amateur sleuth’s latest case unfolds aboard a Caribbean cruise in this installment of Dieker’s mystery series.
Part-time theater director Larkin Day needs a vacation from solving murders. She joins a weeklong, nerd-themed cruise that her best friend, freelance writer Anni Morgan, made possible with her cruise loyalty points. They bring along their boyfriends; Larkin’s mother and her mother’s girlfriend book their own tickets for a cheaper, porthole-less cabin. This is a cruise designed to allow passengers to revel in their nerdiness, be it cosplay or a love of mathematics. Famous fantasy author Adamantine Darcy, on the cruise as a special guest, apparently divines what Larkin does best; the writer wants her sleuthing advice on a murder-related subject. (“It’s for a book,” Adamantine’s assistant says.) Later, when Adamantine seemingly vanishes and a body turns up, Larkin may get another opportunity to put her skillset to use and again unmask a killer. Dieker does an impressive job of further developing the mostly established cast, introducing new and returning characters and easing series newcomers into the story. (Eirwen, a trans woman, is brutally but refreshingly honest, and Anni’s magician boyfriend, Elliott Fox, makes a handy sidekick for Larkin in detective mode.) The gumshoe herself possesses a yearning to understand people and things and a tireless charm, both of which belie her self-professed plainness. The book has plentiful nerdish (mostly technical) details on offer, from “networked sex toys” to the topical concern of reliance on artificial intelligence. These elements pair well with the witty dialogue (Larkin’s epiphany: “Wait. Maybe I’m the smartest person I know, at least for today”), though the characters’ habit of earmarking their own puns wears thin. The fun is in the rich characterizations; the whodunit aspect of the story is somewhat lacking and predictable.
A truly exceptional detective and a first-rate supporting cast kindle this straightforward mystery.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781959565239
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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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