If the Parker estate keeps pouring new wine into old bottles, who’ll be the next vintner? Mary Higgins Clark? Andrew Vachss?...
Coleman (The Hollow Girl, 2014, etc.) follows Michael Brandman (Robert B. Parker’s Damned If You Do, 2013, etc.) into the Jesse Stone franchise, with results that couldn’t be more different.
Before Jesse Stone was police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, or put in his time on the LAPD, he was a shortstop with the Albuquerque Dukes, the Dodgers’ Triple A club, his dreams of big-league glory canceled when a double-play ball relayed by second baseman Vic Prado and a runner’s hard slide into second took out his shoulder for good. Now Prado, of all people, is hosting a Dukes reunion in New York that Jesse feels honor-bound to attend. He’s never been close to the golden boy who stole his girlfriend Kayla, married her, became a major league All Star and retired to become a wealthy venture capitalist, and he has no idea Prado organized this event just so he could involve Jesse in his latest venture. Although Jesse does take the time to bed Kayla’s friend Dee Harrington, Prado’s scheme to rope him in never gets off the ground because Jesse has to scuttle back home to investigate the murder of Tufts student Martina Penworth, 18, and the disappearance of her boyfriend, Benjamin Salter, the only suspect. He has no idea that the crimes in his backyard are as closely linked to Prado as his failure to make it to the majors. Meanwhile, Prado’s mobbed-up colleagues decide they overreached in kidnapping Ben Salter to bend his father, Harlan Salter IV, to their will and offer to make peace by withdrawing the demand they’d made on him. Dad has other ideas. If this all sounds more like Coleman than Parker, wait till you hear the dialogue. More densely and diffusely plotted and less punchy than its original, with characters who often speak in complete sentences.
If the Parker estate keeps pouring new wine into old bottles, who’ll be the next vintner? Mary Higgins Clark? Andrew Vachss? Janet Evanovich?Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16945-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
All three tales offer a dash of detection, but their strong suit is hometown charm.
Veteran Maine crime writers Meier, Hollis, and Ross (Yule Log Murder, 2018, etc.) team up once more for a trio of holiday-themed treats.
Haunted houses, a holiday staple, are an especially good fit for the authors’ folksy Down East setting. When the decrepit house at 66 School St. in Meier’s “Haunted House Murder” is purchased by a young couple, the good citizens of Tinker’s Cove have high hopes for its renovation—at least until the spooky lights and eerie noises emanating from the tower of the home make the local residents fear for the safety of their new neighbors. In “Death by Haunted House,” Hollis ups the ante. Not only does the couple that buys the creaky old place next door to Hayley and Danny Powell look and act peculiar, but Wendi Jo Willis, the real estate agent who sold them the house, disappears shortly after closing the sale. And in "Hallowed Out," Ross casts her net wide, offering a whole bundle of haunted houses for the price of one. To draw off-season tourists to Busman’s Harbor, Harley Prendergast, owner of the Lobsterman’s Wharf Motel, starts up a haunted house trolley tour. Some of his ghosts are questionable at best. But in the venue offering the best-documented of the local legends—the shooting of bootlegger Ned Calhoun—Prendergast’s guests get to witness a real-life shooting that leaves Spencer Jones, the actor who portrays Calhoun, undeniably dead.
All three tales offer a dash of detection, but their strong suit is hometown charm.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1996-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel...
A secondary school English department in West Sussex is turned upside down by a series of bookish killings.
Clare Cassidy is heading into middle age with just her teenage daughter, her faithful dog, her diary, and her teaching job to occupy her time. The most exciting part of her life may be the biography she hopes to write of R.M. Holland, a writer of gothic tales who once lived in the school where she works. But when one of her colleagues in the English department at Talgarth High is found murdered with a line from "The Stranger," the very same Holland story that has long obsessed Clare, left on a Post-it next to her body, she quickly realizes the murderer must be someone who knows an awful lot about her. This suspicion is confirmed when, the day before Halloween, Clare discovers that someone else has left her a note in her own diary. As the violence escalates, Clare and the police must figure out why the killer seems so fixated on Clare—and what a supernaturally tinged tale more than a hundred years old has to do with the quiet lives of small-town Brits. Griffiths alternates points of view among Clare, her 15-year-old daughter, Georgie, and DS Harbinder Kaur, the queer policewoman in charge of the murder investigation. Thrown into the mix are excerpts from "The Stranger," itself a delicious homage to writers like M.R. James. Though all these ingredients occasionally cause some structural unwieldiness, Griffiths (The Vanishing Box, 2018, etc.) hits a sweet spot for readers who love British mysteries and who are looking for something to satisfy an itch once Broadchurch has been binged and Wilkie Collins reread.
Griffiths, who is known for the Magic Men mysteries and the Ruth Galloway series, has written her first stand-alone novel with immensely pleasurable results.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-57785-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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