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
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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