A clever sleuth works deep in the heart of a sordid city as the scent of evil rises from every page.
Another cluster of cases for a medieval Sherlock Holmes.
Despite the approach of Easter, life in London, especially in Brother Athelstan’s Southwark parish of St. Erconwald’s, is never free of danger. William the Weaver bursts into the church asking for sanctuary after having killed the Ishmaelite, a moneylender with an evil reputation. Unable to work, the dying William had taken a loan to support his family, and when he couldn’t repay it, the Ishmaelite demanded William’s wife and daughter in his bed, so William stabbed him, seeing it as self-defense. Athelstan has solved many a murder with Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, but when William is soon found murdered in the locked church, his death is almost the least of their problems. A member of the Fishmongers’ Guild comes to Athelstan in anguish and confesses that a year ago, he and other guild members raped a handsome young Castilian man they’d hired to dance at a party, who later died of his wounds. In revenge, someone is killing guild members with a crossbow after sending them written warnings. Nor is all well at St. Osyth’s Priory on the Thames outside London, where Sister Veronica, Chaplain John, and a pair of newly arrived twin novices are among those who live a surprisingly pampered life. John of Gaunt, young King Richard’s uncle and the power behind his throne, is interested in St. Osyth’s deep-water inlet, which he uses to unload cargo from Castile. Gaunt is an enemy of the London guilds, which have too much power for his liking, but he still asks Cranston to investigate the murders and the loss of a great treasure. Most of the tangled plots and murders are related, but where’s the common thread?
A clever sleuth works deep in the heart of a sordid city as the scent of evil rises from every page.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781448313136
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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