A captivating and emotionally intelligent crime drama.
A Pittsburgh detective frantically searches for the only woman who can help him find his missing daughter in Hayes’ police procedural.
Six months ago, Detective Vic Lenoski’s 15-year-old daughter, Dannie, disappeared; around the same time, three other women, all local strippers, also vanished, and an abundance of evidence implicates their boss, Cora Stills, in a human trafficking scheme that grimly involves all four women. Vic tracks down Cora, but she sets her own house on fire before he can arrest her, forcing him to choose between saving his partner, DetectiveLiz Timmons, or apprehending the suspect; he chooses to rescue Liz, but she suffers terrible burns, and Cora successfully flees. Vic later learns that Cora grew up in North Dakota and her mother still resides there, so he heads to the state in search of new leads. However, he worries that the overall case is being mishandled. District Attorney FrankMarioni demands that someone else, an inexperienced cop, head the investigation, leading Vic to wonder if he has something to hide. Over the course of this crime novel, Hayes poignantly limns Vic’s profound heartache over Dannie’s kidnapping and the terrible toll it takes on his marriage—a relationship that he and his wife interestingly decide to put on hold until the case is solved: “Honestly, I don’t think we can find a way to be together until that’s done,” he tells his spouse. “When we get to that point, I think we can see what that means to each of us, and to us together.” As the investigation goes on, the author artfully paints a bleak tableau of the lowest depths of human nature, sometimes demonstrated by characters who are supposed to be on the side of good. The mystery plot itself is riveting; Hayes expertly guides readers from lead to lead, and they’ll find themselves fully immersed not only in the search, but also in the depiction of the protagonist’s mounting desperation.
A captivating and emotionally intelligent crime drama.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2020
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
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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.
