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
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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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