Tailor-made for the cozy-mystery lover’s Christmas stocking.
This (ultimately) merry little Christmas novella finds Molly Gray, star of the Maid mystery series, harboring yuletide suspicions.
It’s almost Christmas, and narrator Molly, head maid at the Regency Grand Hotel—geographic location unspecified—is initially enjoying the holiday ramp-up with Juan Manuel, her equally cash-strapped live-in boyfriend and the hotel’s pastry chef: They’ve purchased a Charlie Brown Christmas tree, he's stocked their reusable Advent calendar with gewgaws, and so on. But Molly is put off her eggnog when a hot blond living in their apartment building knocks at their door, seeking help unclogging her toilet. “Juan seemed to know her,” Molly thinks. “In fact, she seemed familiar with him, too. But how can that be if she recently moved into the building?” Molly tracks what she considers other examples of Juan’s suspicious behavior as she counts down the days to the hotel staff holiday party, where she hopes not to relive a past Secret Santa–related drama. Readers’ appreciation for this novella will depend on their tolerance for sentimentality and their patience with protagonists who can’t see what’s right in front of them. Some of Molly’s muddlement is explained away by her long-standing problem reading social cues—“Little Miss Literal,” a colleague dubs her—which Prose handles with unshowy sensitivity. Perhaps inadvertently, and certainly endearingly, Molly recalls another frequently befogged maid of letters: Amelia Bedelia. While Prose tips her Santa hat to “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry’s holiday classic likewise centered on two frugal young lovers, she brings original plot points to the Christmas table.
Tailor-made for the cozy-mystery lover’s Christmas stocking.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593875445
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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