A tightly wound missing person mystery.
A man searches for his ex-lover after she mysteriously disappears in Cioffari’s mystery novel.
In New York City in 1995, a man shows up on mystery writer Jake Garrett’s doorstep. He is Norm Davison, the husband of Jake’s ex-lover, Vera. Vera has disappeared, and Davison thinks Jake can help solve the puzzle. Vera was the great love of Jake’s life, so he agrees to help find her. The clues point in many different directions: Vera’s 9-year-old son died recently, and she fell apart after his death, but she seemed better recently; a perusal of Vera’s journals indicates she was looking to move across the country. Jake talks to Vera’s friends and a police contact in search of more information and attempts to identify what Vera referred to in her journals as the “Blue Flower” (this novel’s Rosebud). There’s some evidence to suggest that Vera used, or at least came into contact with, an illicit drug. Things start to go south as Jake is set up, threatened, and assaulted in the course of his search, which seems to confirm that Vera didn’t simply walk away from her life and that something more sinister is going on. So where is Vera? Nowhere near where Jake expects, and no one who might know where she is proves trustworthy. The narrative is both fast-paced and contemplative; Jake spends a lot of time mulling over what things mean (“She’s a distant memory. A stranger. Who was I kidding? She was the dead center of my sorrow”) and replays conversations he had with Vera when they were together in his mind. A lot of the novel takes place at night, and the story has a dreamlike quality. Jake constantly questions whether he’s experiencing something real or dreaming—sometimes to a degree that distracts from the central mystery. This is also a very New York novel, in a great way; Jake’s search takes him all over the city as he continues to encounter dead ends and red herrings, keeping readers on their toes.
A tightly wound missing person mystery.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781604893748
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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