A whodunit with twists and turns and some literary pyrotechnics.
In West’s mystery novel, a fire-twirling, whip-cracking amateur detective in Los Angeles brings the heat when it appears that her friend has been met with foul play.
Don’t call Brighid LaFlamme a dominatrix; she prefers to be called an event coordinator, or as her friends call her, “Fire Goddess.” She schedules performances for Hedon’s Sanctuary, “one of the best and safest BDSM and kink play spaces in Los Angeles County,” in which clubgoers use whips, paddles, handcuffs, and other toys; she also finds belly dancers, fire breathers, and pin jugglers for Renaissance fairs and other events needing such talent. As dangerous as their skills can be, the fire-wielding folks are well-trained, and they’re more likely to chat up a fire marshal than wreak havoc. When one of her own small tribe of “Fire Buddies,” Galen Kenneth Greene, dies alone in a fire-related accident, Brighid suspects there’s more to the story, as she trained him in fire safety herself. As with many LA tales, there’s a few sleazy movie producers, including Zayne “Wally” Wallace, who makes small but profitable straight-to-DVD movies with promising, attractive actors. There’s also a bachelor cop, Sgt. Harvey Simon, who, like Brighid, knows something’s rotten in Big Bear, where Galen’s body was found, and there are other Fire Buddies, including Mark and Matt, identical twin fire-breathers from Missouri. The cast also includes two of Brighid’s college friends, Layla and Godiva, who’ve belly-danced their way with her into their 30s, but who have more traditional jobs during the work week. West’s double narrative effectively weaves the history of Brighid and her Fire Buddies, which includes Galen’s death, together with the aftermath of his murder. This gambit enables the reader to see some things more clearly than the main characters do as each plot nears its climax. The book doesn’t entertain easy answers for why some people are drawn to such fiery ways of living; however, it doesn’t entertain complex ones, either, as it’s more interested in the mystery plot. After all, when the two timelines stop twirling like flaming batons and readers see how everything connects into one story, the author’s done her trick—she doesn’t have to tell all her secrets.
A whodunit with twists and turns and some literary pyrotechnics.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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