A welcome mix of familiar yet complex characters and a deadly mystery to solve.
Locander’s police procedural centers around a train wreck in West Virginia.
Frank Campbell, aged 65, has seen better days. Frank works in a railyard in Granite Point, West Virginia. He is easily aggravated, walks with a limp, drinks too much, and doesn’t get along particularly well with his son, Kevin. At the beginning of the story, his friend and colleague, Tom Ryder, is about to retire. Tom is a few years older than Frank, though he is in much better condition…or so it seems. Soon after Tom retires, Frank finds his friend’s body. Tom apparently shot himself with an automatic pistol. As disconcerting as Tom’s death is, there are more shocking events to follow. Not long after Tom’s suicide, nine people are killed when a passenger train called the Allegheny Limited crashes. It is noted that “The Allegheny Limited had not jumped the rails. It was as if the rails disappeared beneath it.” Could someone have sabotaged the tracks? Enter investigator Andrea “Andy” Mayland. This is not the first train accident that Andy has looked into, but this case has a number of peculiarities. For one, a local boy with autism named Beau was found injured but alive amid the wreckage. Beau is known for his love of trains and he likes nothing more than recording them on video; could he be involved in the derailing? Another possible suspect is the rage-filled and self-loathing Frank. He is prone to drunken outbursts, but could he really be responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people?
The author takes time to populate Granite Point with memorable characters. (It may be a tough place, but the residents have engaging personalities.) Kevin Campbell has his beloved hot rod, a “an auto cinema-worthy of George Lucas’s American Graffiti.” Kevin’s wife, Trisha, is a former barrel racer who is thrilled when she welcomes a new horse into her life. Although Trisha did not buy the horse, Kevin sarcastically names it “Bankruptcy” and recalls how, when the couple previously owned a horse, it had “nearly pushed them over the cliff and into the Valley of Fiscal Destitution.” Frank refers to an old woman in town that he strongly dislikes as “Josef Stalin in support hose!” Such humanizing details elevate the story above a dry procedural. The investigation itself leads to some obvious moments; Andy explains to Kevin, “When something like this happens, we look at everything,” including whether the train wreck was intentional. Kevin warns Andy that she needs to be careful in her questioning—otherwise, “[She] might find doors that won’t open when [she] come[s] knocking.” One would assume that an investigator would need to look at all of the possible causes for such an accident and that an investigator would know to be careful in their questioning. None of this is sufficient to derail the story; at one point, the local sheriff asks Kevin point blank, “Well, how’s about the Allegheny Limited? What’s your take? You think it was an accident?” The reader, drawn in by the distinctive characters, will want to find out.
A welcome mix of familiar yet complex characters and a deadly mystery to solve.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781960865359
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Christmas Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 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
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.
Romance novelist Finlay Donovan, who’s never met a line she wouldn’t cross, crosses several new ones in her attempt to prove her nanny/best friend’s innocence of theft.
The good news is that Veronica Ramirez isn’t in jail despite the evidence against her of pocketing the substantial profits from her college sorority Kappa Gamma’s weekly succession of illegal gambling nights. The bad news begins with the fact that she’s under house arrest in the custody of her mother, Norma, who vociferously disapproves of Vero’s unplanned Atlantic City wedding to her boyfriend, Javi. Then there’s the fact that her sorority sisters, headed by former president and recent graduate Mia and current vice president Ava, have closed ranks in giving damning evidence against her. No wonder Vero and Norma have been the recipients of an unrelenting barrage of anonymous and often disgusting threats. Oh, and don’t forget that small-time bookie Theo Sideris, Vero’s alibi witness because they were sharing a bed at the time, has gone AWOL. Searching for him in a frantic attempt to clear Vero’s name ends up implicating virtually every other member of the cast in one crime or another and pretty much guarantees that by the time the charge of theft against Vero has finally been dismissed, she and Finn will have plenty of other brand-new charges to contend with. Fans of Cosimano’s overcaffeinated franchise can only pray that Finn will return safely to the arms of her own improbable lover, police detective Nick Anthony, so that she can concentrate on supplying her agent, Sylvia Barr, with steamy chapters of her new novel.
What provisions of the law are left for the heroine to breach in the next outrageous installment? Readers can only guess.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781250337597
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
