A rewarding mystery with a satisfying ending.
A homicide detective tracks a killer amongst office politics, old high school drama, and many secrets in Martin’s mystery novel.
Washington, D.C., 1965: Joan Smollett is found dead in her office. Her purse has clearly been ransacked (her wallet is missing), and there’s a page from the dictionary of words beginning with the letter “L” stuffed into her mouth. Joan was head of the editorial research department at National Geographic magazine, and a stickler for rules and protocol—like she was back in high school, when she intimidated and annoyed other students. Just a few days before the murder, Joan and her husband Jeffrey attended their 30th high school reunion, where they encountered William Price, a man who has hated Joan since their school days. Back then, she had a condescending attitude, which seems to have followed her into adulthood and continued to make enemies. At work, Joan had reported journalist Xander Riley’s behavior (concerning an ill-advised demonstration of a poison dart) to Melville Bell Grosvenor, National Geographic’s president and editor-in-chief. Grosvenor scolded Riley, which increased Riley’s anger at Joan, who had previously annoyed him with her criticism of his writing (“He stared daggers at the stick-thin researcher”). Also under suspicion is Joan’s husband, Jeffrey, who appears to be a grieving husband but has a shaky alibi and was sleeping in a separate room from his wife. All of them are viable suspects, reckons police Detective Archimedes Bib, but the killer could be someone surprising hiding in plain sight. Martin has crafted a superb mystery with a memorable cast of characters and many unexpected twists and turns. Joan is a believably unlikable person but a sympathetic victim, and the murder suspects are as complex as they are different from one another. Riley in particular stands out as the layers of his character are peeled back over the course of the story; his youthfully reckless attitude is juxtaposed against Bib’s wise and experienced perspective, making their contrasting points-of-view the most compelling aspect of the book.
A rewarding mystery with a satisfying ending.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798218511876
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gemini Originals
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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