A remarkably original achievement.
In D’Stair’s novel, a gruesome murder is committed in famous pianist Glenn Gould’s hotel room, compelling him to defend his innocence.
Glenn Gould wakes up in a hotel room he has no memory of checking into, alarmingly separated from the potpourri of pills that permit him to navigate life. The scene he discovers in his room is as bizarre as it is macabre—a woman has been hacked to death with a hatchet, and a record player that is not his own is playing a recording of him (he doesn’t own that either) performing the Goldberg Variations on repeat. Stuffed in the victim’s mouth is a crumpled piece of paper on which is printed a hostile review of one of his performances, written by the critic Paul Henry Lang. Later, Gould learns the dead woman is a housekeeper who thought ill of him. Detective Inspector Dziurzynski interviews Gould and points out plainly how incriminating the scene is. Gould protests he is not only innocent but bewildered, lost in a “placid, medicinal haze,” his “nervous system in a state of fray”; the musician’s relentlessly neurotic condition is vividly and humorously depicted by the author in this enchantingly peculiar novel. Lang turns up dead next—he is killed within a day of the housekeeper’s demise—but Gould insists, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that his hands are clean. The possibilities are many; maybe Gould is being framed? Of course, if he is not the killer, surely his life is in grave danger. As Dziurzynski notes: “If what I believe is correct, Mister Gould, there is someone very dangerous standing behind you, in the dark, breathing down your neck. They’ve proven themselves not only vicious, but calculating. Patient. In one way or another, however unwittingly, you are their link to whichever macabre impulse fuels this blood-thirsty endeavor.”
D’Stair has composed a grippingly deconstructed version of the classic crime drama—not only is it never entirely obvious who the killer is, it’s never certain Gould can rule himself out. It might even be the case there is another Glenn Gould somewhere, a doppelgänger of sorts. The reader will never solve the crime or predict the novel’s defiantly strange ending—that is a decisive neatness the author seems intent on undermining. D’Stair paints a dizzying picture that is deliciously complex; apparently, there is nothing as philosophically intractable as murder. As Dziurzynski declaims: “Murder is gonna be the most convoluted kerfuffle imaginable. Not even imaginable! A happenstance so outside typical human experience the truth of any instance would sound farcical if laid out by barristers to jury-folk.” The dialogue between Dziurzynski and Gould can be a touch cute—snappy one-liners are exchanged with a manufactured alacrity and a contrived rhetorical refinement. But even this literary hyperbole seems appropriate if understood as an ironic comment on the detective genre, a reinvention of a style that must be as much commandeered as it is renovated. Either way, the prose is never a fatal distraction, and one can’t help but be fascinated by Gould’s compelling amalgam of genius and mental disability. This is a thrillingly unconventional novel, one that successfully reinvents an old literary convention from the inside.
A remarkably original achievement.Pub Date: March 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798348359539
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Late Marriage Press
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.
Second of the Walter Nash thrillers—following Nash Falls (2025)—in which the remade hero seeks vengeance.
Due to urgent circumstances, Nash has bulked himself up to become the “muscled and tatted fighting machine” now known as Dillon Hope. His antagonist is Victoria Steers, a global drug dealer who wants him dead. Not realizing his new identity, she enlists Hope to free her mother, Masuyo, from a prison in Myanmar. As an incentive, she shoots one of her associates and threatens to frame Hope for the murder unless he complies. She also wants him to find Nash. He in turn wants to kill Victoria to avenge the death of his innocent daughter, Maggie. “If I go down,” he muses, “I’m taking others with me. Starting with Victoria Steers.” He learns that Victoria had killed all her siblings to eliminate business competition. But as heartless as Victoria is, her mother, Masuyo, is even worse. In league with the Chinese government in a perverse plan to kill as many Americans as possible through fentanyl overdose, she shows contempt for Victoria for her perceived weaknesses. Readers won’t find many happy family relationships here: mother-daughter, father-son, husband-wife—all fraught. Hope’s employer, who accompanies him to Myanmar, is a billionaire chief executive with a dodgy past (i.e., probably killed his father). And there’s a mega-billionaire with an astronomical IQ and ditch-deep morals who, putting it mildly, does not have America’s best interests at heart. As a teenager, he’d defeated two world chess champions; as an adult, he regards his dealings with the world in terms of master chess moves. Only one character seems truly decent and credible—Hiroko, Victoria’s former nanny and lifelong companion, who provides Hope with valuable insights into the Steers’ background, which is partly Chinese. Searing grudges, simple evil, and not-so-simple misunderstandings carry the cast through this complex, action-packed plot. This sequel ties out the loose ends dangling in Nash Falls, which would be helpful to read first. To get to the requisite ending, though, Baldacci takes pains to surprise the reader. It works but often feels forced.
Filled with action, violence, and more twists than a bag of pretzels.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781538758021
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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