A smart, twisty thriller featuring a clever detective and all the ingredients of a classic whodunit.
In Helms’ mystery novel, a grizzled detective investigates the murder of a former football hero.
The year is 1977, and in the small town of Choctaw, North Carolina, the murder of an innocent man by police leads to a race riot that tarnishes the community’s reputation. A Super Bowl win involving local athlete Winlock Savage goes some way toward restoring the town’s good name. Forty-five years later, Savage is long-retired but still a celebrity, so, when he is found gruesomely murdered, the local police force turns to the State Bureau of Investigation’s best agent, Wade “the Blade” Durham, to solve the case. Durham pairs up with local police Chief Roberta “Bobbi” Navarro to look into who may have held a grudge against Savage. The answer, it turns out, is many people—including a gun-wielding jealous girlfriend and those who may have resented Savage’s lawsuit to prevent a ski resort from being built in the town. Things get even more complicated when Durham begins to notice eerie parallels between the ex-football hero’s death and the murder of a young woman over four decades earlier. With a smooth narrative voice (“Despite the gradual westward expansion of high-density cities and towns in the state, there were still pockets isolated by choice; enclaves where family trees resembled French braids”) and enough twists to keep even the most jaded thriller fans on their toes, Helms crafts an engaging narrative with an old-school protagonist who embodies the classic detective (Durham has witty one-liners, an appreciation for attractive women, and killer instincts). The dialogue can occasionally come across as cheesy (“Sorry, Blade. We pulled a hot one”), but Helms effectively builds genuine tension. Serious themes of racism, corruption, power, and sex are deftly woven into the multiple mini-mysteries that pop up under the larger question of who killed Savage, adding depth to an otherwise straightforward procedural.
A smart, twisty thriller featuring a clever detective and all the ingredients of a classic whodunit.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798990041226
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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