A fabulous, well-researched whodunit.
A widely disliked, wealthy old woman is found murdered on the grounds of her manicured estate in a crime novel steeped in drama, trauma, and secrets.
In Winslow’s auspicious debut mystery, Faith Wesley, a prominent resident of affluent Lake Forest, Illinois, must have been killed in her garden early in the day; the ground beneath her corpse feels moist from morning dew but not soaked from sprinklers that fire up at 6:45 a.m. Veteran investigating detective Tom Edison notes a “gash the color of crushed pomegranates” on Faith’s pale neck. The estate’s security cameras weren’t working at the time of the murder, and the groundskeeper hasn’t shown up for work yet. Faith’s 40-something daughter, Linda Edwards, treats Tom icily, saying she has to get her 10-year-old daughter to soccer. Faith and Linda had a turbulent relationship, but Linda’s been living at the estate since her messy divorce from a well-known Chicago attorney, who, it’s later revealed, has a reason to want Faith dead. Tom, divorced and recently separated from his live-in partner—they broke up fighting over a cat, as she was pro-feline and he wasn’t—wastes no time sleeping with Linda’s best friend, Nora, who lived with the Wesleys decades ago after her parents died after driving their car into a lagoon—the cause of which has never been established. A lagoon-related mishap looms large in Tom’s life; when he was 13, a speedboat’s collision with a wooden raft in another lagoon caused his friend to nearly drown, and a secret about the crash continues to haunt him. This complex mystery offers much to keep the reader engaged, including compelling, flawed characters; a complicated yet believable plot touching on themes of corruption and class; strong dialogue; and a satisfying ending. The author excels at accurate details, as well—even supplying the correct number of racquetball courts in a well-known Chicago North Shore sports center. Winslow’s use of language throughout also deserves special recognition, as it’s smart, flowing, and often poetic, as when Tom, sharing his past with Nora, notes that “Dark Knowledge had to be guarded, protected like a cracked rib, shielded like an abscess.”
A fabulous, well-researched whodunit.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-955018-19-7
Page Count: 442
Publisher: Quid Mirum Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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