An entertaining follow-up with vivid characters and a rich sense of place.
Woolworth’s sophomore series mystery involves a priceless phonograph cylinder, arson, and a cold missing-person case.
New Orleans antique dealer Bruneau “Bru” Abellard investigates a turn-of-the-century Edison cylinder that he discovers in a hidden compartment of a sideboard; the name “Clarence” is written on the side of cardboard box containing it. The recorded music on this cylinder is thought to be that of musician Buddy Bolden, “the one who started it all.” Bolden never recorded, but, Abellard explains, “contemporaries said he was the first to take the rhythms of ragtime and marry them to the emotional expressiveness of the blues, and that without that union we wouldn’t have what we now call jazz.” Abellard’s investigation into who’s playing the cornet on the cylinder leads him to Izzy Weisman, an elderly collector of New Orleans memorabilia. No sooner does he provide Abellard with the device that will play the cylinder than a suspicious fire burns Weisman’s house down. The mystery deepens when the body of Arnold Jesse, a 13-year-old missing since 1967, is found in the remains of Weisman’s home. Abellard, an amateur detective and consultant to the New Orleans Police Department, once again teams with childhood friend and property-crimes detective Thibodeaux “Bo” Duplessis. Although Abellard and his girlfriend, historian and puzzle-solver Sallie Mae Maguire, are “on a break,” he relies on her expertise, as well, and they agree to work together. As in his series starter The Lafitte Affair (2024), Woolworth populates his richly atmospheric New Orleans setting with a gallery of colorful, eccentric, and formidable characters. Readers’ mileage may vary on the author’s use of Abellard and Duplessis as alternating narrators, but Prosper Fortune, whom Woolworth introduced in the first novel, is developed in this installment in surprising ways. This is also not a book to read while hungry; Abellard is something of a foodie, and several of the Big Easy’s finest eateries and signature dishes appear over the course of the narrative.
An entertaining follow-up with vivid characters and a rich sense of place.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798898200350
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Level Best - Historia
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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