A thoughtful exploration of friendship, grief, and divine justice.
Headworth’s Christian murder mystery follows a (possibly) possessed cop.
This investigative thriller set in rural Michigan tracks police officer Paul Bennett’s attempts to unravel the murder of his best friend and mentor, Charlie Spence. Charlie is a legendary cop with a tragic past who once worked in Detroit; one night, he disappears during a shift. Paul discovers him flayed, near death, and whispering cryptic final words (“Trust no one”), and he quickly becomes entangled in a web of deception and spiritual warfare. As he investigates, Paul starts experiencing memory lapses, strange visions, and signs of a darker force at play. A posthumous letter and a CD from Charlie urge him to continue investigating. Further clues suggest that Charlie’s family was murdered by a massive drug cartel. Paul suffers from unexplained injuries and finds himself traveling to Detroit during blackouts, leading him to believe that he’s an unwilling vessel in a divine—or diabolical—mission. The line between the physical and the spiritual blurs as Paul navigates corruption, grief, and various revelations, all while protecting his family, deepening his faith, and honoring his fallen friend. Headworth’s writing is direct and immersive (though sometimes clunky), blending the tropes of procedural crime fiction with spiritual allegory. Emphasizing redemption through faith, the narrative focuses on the tension between religious tradition and the mysterious ways God acts through flawed humans. The author effectively captures the protagonist’s psychological turmoil and spiritual growth. The novel’s mix of crime drama and Christian messaging is compelling, but the story suffers from uneven pacing due to its extensive theological digressions. Still, the narrative works on a basic level as both a mystery and a meditation on faith and purpose; the supernatural elements related to Paul’s possible possession or divine empowerment add complexity to an otherwise relatively generic genre story and intensify questions about the nature of redemption and prophecy in modern times.
A thoughtful exploration of friendship, grief, and divine justice.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781662892943
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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