A compelling mystery anchored by a winningly roguish hero.
A musician with investigative chops connects a missing man with a money scam in Breen’s mystery novel.
In the author’s second installment in the Seamus O’Neill Mystery series, Seamus’ boss at the Ryder Detective Agency, John Ryder, knows his new part-time employee is in the office because it “smells like a distillery.” Thirty-three-year-old Seamus, a barfly and Midwestern rock musician of dwindling reputation by the 1990s, explains that his background in music helps him realize when something he is investigating is out of alignment: “There are keys and chord progressions, and, when something doesn’t work, you sense it more than see it.” He’s all ears when Mary Hoffman, one of his former lovers, asks Ryder to investigate what her younger brother Tom is up to. He’s withdrawn thousands of dollars from his account and has a shoe box full of fake documents; oddly, he also has a sudden interest in Shakespeare. Shortly after Mary contacts the detective agency, Kathy Siler hires Ryder for help in finding her missing father, multimillionaire Bertram Newman, who, like Tom, suddenly became keen on the Bard. Beautiful—and towering at well over 6 feet tall—police detective Erin Meyer and Seamus consider multiple suspects in Bertram’s disappearance, including other local Shakespeare aficionados, such as Tom’s roommate, who knew Newman. The book has an easy pace, believable dialogue, and scenes that string together cohesively. But the author tends to go too much into the weeds; a section on the numerous times one of Seamus’ fellow musicians was shot does not move the story along, and the name-checking of brand-name drinks falls flat. References to the previous book in the series are unobtrusive, and it’s engaging to see Seamus evolve from a dive-bar musician hitting on multiple young women to a thoughtful investigator crushing on Erin because of her desire to help people (but her long legs are worth a look).
A compelling mystery anchored by a winningly roguish hero.Pub Date: July 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798986208336
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Dutch Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
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