A slow-burning, spellbinding whodunit. Agatha Christie, to whom it’s dedicated, would be proud.
The search for answers about a missing schoolgirl takes 30 years to pay off.
Fifteen-year-old Lára Marteinsdóttir, who’d contracted to work the summer of 1956 as a domestic helper for former Supreme Court of Iceland barrister Óttar Óskarsson and his wife, Ólöf Blöndal, in their retreat on the little island of Videy, announces one morning that she’s packed her bags and is leaving early to rejoin her parents in Reykjavík. The couple are jolted by her early departure, but her parents are far more jolted when she never shows up. Since not many young women go missing in Iceland, the case, first investigated by police officer Kristján Kristjánsson, swiftly becomes a cause célèbre, but that doesn’t lead to a solution—not in 1956, not in 1966, not in 1976. It’s not until 1986, on the eve of Reykjavík’s 200th anniversary, that Valur Róbertsson, a promising reporter for the struggling weekly Vikubladid, gets a phone call from someone calling herself Julía that so whets his interest in the case that he keeps overpromising developments to editor Dagbjartur Steinsson, who in turn pushes him harder and harder and even leaks a wildly premature announcement of his upcoming scoop to other news outlets. Valur focuses on a quartet of old friends—Óskarsson himself, city councillor Páll Jóhannesson, developer Högni Eyfjörd, and wholesaler Finnur Stephensen, whose dying words to his actress wife were “You have to go to Videy”—who regularly met on the island. When Valur is unable to deliver the goods, his sister, Sunna Róbertsdóttir, puts her dissertation in comparative literature on hold and takes over the investigation just as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev announce their plans to meet in Reykjavík for their historic summit.
A slow-burning, spellbinding whodunit. Agatha Christie, to whom it’s dedicated, would be proud.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781250907332
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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PERSPECTIVES
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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