A satisfying mystery in a vividly realized historical setting.
In this historical mystery set in ancient Egypt, a career diplomat searches for his missing brother-in-law while also investigating a case of royal blackmail.
Hani is back in Holmes’ second book (Bird in a Snare, 2020) in the Lord Hani mystery series. The protagonist is a former diplomat with serious reservations about King Akhenaten’s rule. Policy disagreements have prompted him to leave active service in the diplomatic corps since he’s unable to enforce a foreign policy he doesn’t respect. But the bigger issue is religion; King Akhenaten traded observing polytheistic traditions for worshipping a sun god, “dazzling Aten, the Visible One.” The new religion makes it an uneasy time in the changing kingdom, as does a recently founded, unstable capital city, which still has “a look of rawness.” “Everything was dust and gravel except for the whitewashed splendor of the temples and palaces,” Hani observes cynically. Despite Hani’s displeasure with the new regime, he tries to keep himself and his family in the government’s good graces. Hani’s brother-in-law, Amen-em-hut, a prophet of Amen-Ra, is not as diplomatic. After openly complaining about Akhenaten’s heresy and suggesting he be assassinated, he’s gone missing. Drawing on his contacts in the capital, Hani begins his search for him, but he’s soon asked to help with another problem. Kiya, the king’s wife and a friend of Hani’s, is being blackmailed for having an affair with an artisan sculptor. As if things weren’t chaotic enough, Hani agrees to host Aziru—a newly added vassal—and his entourage as a favor to the king. A crowded house becomes more crowded. “When was the last time anything normal happened in our kingdom?” Hani asks Maya, his faithful scribe and constant companion.
The novel meticulously constructs its historical setting. The cast is equally intricate, comprising a lively circle of Hani’s family, friends, and acquaintances. The major plot threads are Hani’s investigations, but the novel also juggles several satisfying minor arcs, including Maya’s marriage to Hani’s daughter Sat-hut-haru and Hani’s youngest daughter’s interest in medicine. Holmes captures the pressures and anxieties of regime change, religious allegiances, and political jockeying, but the author never loses sight of the drama, joy, and pain within Hani’s household. Holmes expertly develops the cast and setting; for example, in a scene that vividly reunites Hani and Kiya, Hani notices that “her big almond eyes looked twice as enormous edged with kohl. She wore a short Nubian-style wig, angled below the ears to become even shorter in back.” He goes on: “It was the latest style, and it had never looked better than upon this glittering young princess.” The danger of such a carefully researched subject is that the material can capsize the plot, but Holmes ably inserts historical exposition into his storytelling. Occasionally, the Byzantine network of characters makes it difficult to connect with minor figures, but an overstuffed cast makes for more suspects and opportunities for sequels.
A satisfying mystery in a vividly realized historical setting.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73498-683-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N.L. Holmes
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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