An engagingly witty whodunit brimming with inventive twists and turns.
In Stagner’s mystery novel, a pair of retired sisters find a dead body on their property and become the prime suspects in a murder investigation.
Sisters Claire Browning and Avery Halverson decide to retire from their stressful jobs as legal assistants to a quiet home in rural East Texas nestled within a gated community called Rancho Exotica. Their bucolic tranquility is shattered when the book’s titular “venue” of vultures leads them to a dead body in a densely wooded section of their property. The deceased turns out to be a neighbor, Thorne Mondae, who was clearly murdered—he was found with a hunting arrow lodged in his heart. Because Claire recently had an angry confrontation with him (she yelled at him for trespassing on her property while hunting), she becomes a person of interest in his murder investigation. She’s so fretful she’ll be arrested that she withholds from the police a video her trail camera took of the killer—a “shadowy figure” neither of the sisters can identify—since it captures Claire as well, placing her at the scene of the crime. Claire and Avery join forces with Jay Vidocq, the dreamy head of security at Rancho Exotica and a former Dallas homicide detective. As the investigation deepens, the list of suspects grows—Thorne turns out to have been an unsavory man with a dark past—and the relationship between Avery and Jay turns romantic. Much of this crime drama is deeply formulaic and melodramatic; here, Avery explains her turn as an amateur sleuth: “When Thorne Mondae was murdered in our forest and we became suspects, our world turned upside down. We need to restore that world to its rightful position. That’s why I want so much to discover who killed Mr. Mondae.” But this delightfully cozy detective story, which is as humorous as it is intelligently conceived, does have a lightsome companionability to it. Readers who enjoy the work of Agatha Christie are sure to like this novel as well—it’s fun and largely undemanding entertainment.
An engagingly witty whodunit brimming with inventive twists and turns.Pub Date: June 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798350947991
Page Count: 270
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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