An engrossing thriller built around a strong central character.
Trouble reliably finds an aging but clever private eye in Helms’ witty mystery novel.
Ex-cop Eamon Gold has a soft spot for losers. Jordy Pankratz is a down-on-his-luck bookkeeper who approaches Eamon for protection; Jordy has borrowed money from a loan shark, and now goons are threatening him (“ol’ Sammy wasn’t averse to paying the band for a little knuckle music to motivate delinquent payers”). After Eamon and his protégé, Sonny Malehala, chase off the thugs, the loan shark, Samuel Brownlee, hires Eamon to find his missing wife, Rhonda, in exchange for letting Jordy pay off his debt unmolested over time. Eamon is soon drawn into the world of Rhonda’s Real Housewives–like friends and their largely criminal mates, and the bodies soon start dropping. Eamon is lured to a cabin belonging to Julia Wanamaker, who had run away with Rhonda, and he makes a startling discovery there. Shortly thereafter, Samuel is arrested for murder, but Eamon doesn’t believe he’s guilty. Eamon also gets hired to assist attorney Wilson Varnadore, the “Great White Shark,” in his defense of Libby Cordelia Hackney, a P.I. suspected of the murder of a missing radio station owner. The more Eamon looks into the two cases, the more suspects he uncovers, some of whom end up dead. Eamon attempts to stay on everyone’s good side as he unravels the complex mysteries. This entertaining fifth entry in Helms’ series features an older and mostly wiser Eamon, who’s pondering his legacy. (His protégé, Sonny, is quite content with his role as a security director at a Hawaiian resort.) In former cop Libby, Eamon and his paramour, Heidi, see a very rough diamond needing some polish. Helms takes an intriguing approach to the narrative, starting in the present, then flashing back to a year earlier, then proceeding slowly back to the present. Given all the affairs, keeping track of everyone’s motives can be difficult, but it’s energizing to try to solve the mysteries along with Eamon.
An engrossing thriller built around a strong central character.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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