An unapologetic valentine to golden age whodunits that sports its clichés as proudly as badges.
A former prosecutor haunted by his role in the unjust conviction of a murder suspect years ago summons noted attorney Robin Lockwood to his isolated Oregon manse to enlist her aid. What could possibly go wrong?
Archie Stallings was the star witness against fellow student Jose Alvarez in 1990, when Alvarez was sentenced to death in the matter of his girlfriend Margo Prescott's fatal bludgeoning. Seven years later, a gloating confession that Stallings makes to the lawyer defending him against a rape charge, Frank Melville—whose ringing courtroom speech when he was a prosecutor sent Alvarez to death row—torments Melville, since attorney-client privilege demands his silence. Upon Stallings’ own death, Melville resolves to do whatever it takes to win Alvarez’s release. Working under his direction with investigator Ken Breland, Robin gets Alvarez’s conviction overturned, and he’s set free. But he’s not grateful or happy about his invitation to Black Oaks, Melville’s mountaintop retreat, which has its own dark history of murder. When Corey Rockwell, the fading Hollywood star Melville’s invited to join them, ostensibly to discuss making a film based on the Alvarez case, begins to smell a rat, the stage is set for Melville’s stabbing in his private elevator. Margolin steeps this impossible murder in a nostalgic brew of family curses, ancient grudges, escaped convicts, improbable masquerades, supplementary homicides, and other contrivances. Fans will rejoice to detect echoes of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Ellery Queen’s The Siamese Twin Mystery, and countless puzzles by John Dickson Carr, though they may find the net effect more like a scrapbook of beloved memories than a coherent narrative of contemporary murder.
An unapologetic valentine to golden age whodunits that sports its clichés as proudly as badges.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-5846-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
