The scattershot mystery is consistently upstaged by Hollywood gossip. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
As Hitler’s troops mass at the Polish border during Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939, Paramount costume designer Edith Head and her amanuensis, Lillian Frost, are saddled with a much smaller mystery. At least it looks smaller.
Someone signing themselves Argus has been sending silent film star Marion Davies anonymous notes as cryptic as they are menacing. And not just Marion, best known these days as the mistress of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, but retired makeup artist Clarence Baird and his pinochle buddy, assistant director Rudi Vollmer. Having heard all about Edith and Lillian’s earlier sleuthing successes, Marion wants them to make Argus stop. In short order, the two women arrange to meet with Clarence and Rudi; Edith alertly identifies Clarence as Argus; and Clarence, presumably stricken by guilt, kills himself. Except his death isn’t really a suicide, as LAPD Detective Gene Morrow, Lillian’s former swain, indicates, and the notes from Argus don’t stop—they just switch from handwritten to typewritten. Clearly there’s more going on here, and Lillian suspects it’s connected to a spike in local interest in the work of Paolo Montsalvo, Mussolini’s favorite painter, and the reappearance of American-born Nazi Kaspar Biel, whose role as cultural attaché only hints at his involvement in deep-laid secrets. Among the many celebrity cameos—Orson Welles, Wally Westmore, Mitchell Leisen, Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin—the most notable is the absence of Marion’s cousin Herman Mankiewicz, who fed Welles much of the insider material for Citizen Kane.Maybe Patrick is saving him for the next installment.
The scattershot mystery is consistently upstaged by Hollywood gossip. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8928-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.
A vainglorious viscount is murdered in this 1910-set mystery—Montgomery’s first novel for adults and the launch of the Stockingham & Pike series.
As the novel opens, narrator Stephen Pike, not yet 20 years old and fresh from a two-year stint at a London prison, finds himself in Cornwall at World’s End, taking a job as a second footman at a remote manor house. (So far, so Downton Abbey.) He arrives at a time of high anxiety: Lord Stockingham-Welt has seen to it that the windows of Tithe Hall have been boarded up in anticipation of Comet Halley’s appearance—“This time, it will be the end of the world,” he insists. The comet spares the earth, but the night doesn’t spare the viscount: The next morning, he’s found dead in his study, which was locked from the inside, with an ancestral crossbow’s bolt in his eye. Who better than un-alibied recent inmate Stephen to take the blame for the murder? To Stephen’s aid comes Miss Decima Stockingham, the viscount’s elderly great-aunt, who makes Downton Abbey’s Violet Crawley seem like an earth mother. A frustrated scientist, Miss Decima hated her late nephew—“Conrad stole my inheritance, my sister, my career…everything”—but she hates Stephen’s victimization more. The book’s ingenious reveal, which hinges on a long-buried Stockingham family secret, is reached through a combination of Miss Decima’s scientific-inquiry-fueled deductions and Stephen’s precocious puzzling (the story features both a hedge maze and a spot-the-difference-style brainteaser). The odd-couple intergenerational sleuthing duo is a welcome new arrival on the historical-mystery scene, with Stephen’s squeamishness about Miss Decima’s filterless fuming a mainstay of the book’s unremitting humor (Stephen: “I’d never heard language like it…and I’d just spent the last month sharing a bunk with a man called Filthy Mick”).
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063458772
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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