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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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