Engaging writing and noir overtones offset some problematic content in this clever detective story.
A private eye tracks down three women, each of whom might be heir to a substantial fortune, in Helms’ mystery.
When Whitlock, a vice detective for the Charleston Police Department, loses a civilian informant, the 40-something quits his job, deciding to work for himself instead of dealing with the bureaucracy and politics of the force. Five years into his lucrative and morally gray new career as a private investigator, Whitlock is asked to find a lost heir to an elderly billionaire, Tucker Donovan. At the behest of his occasional lover, local attorney Dahlia Barba, Whitlock takes the job. It immediately becomes evident that this is not a simple missing person case—the day after he takes the assignment, Whitlock finds his office burgled. When he discovers a link between a recently murdered private investigator and his own case, Whitlock must begin to uncover layers of mysteries with puzzling connections as he determines three possibilities for Donovan’s lost daughter. Before he leaves his job, Whitlock is characterized as a morally questionable detective, not above breaking laws to get a confession. (In fact, he seems to break the law less after becoming a private eye.) Whitlock endearingly embraces his new role, using a cliched stylized eye on his business card, of which he is extremely proud. Helms leans into the noir genre, creating a somewhat misogynistic yet somehow still likable lead in Whitlock (“Compared to her skanked-out rags from the night before, she was radiant, her little red dress about a mile above her knees”). He’s at least self-aware of his stereotypical misogyny, even calling himself a “chauvinist pig” at one point. This misogyny is offset by Whitlock’s mature response to an independent women’s sexuality (his relationship with Barba is sexual without being possessive—both of them have other sexual partners without it being an issue). Helms’ writing is engaging and amusing, artful in its wordplay and dialogue. The mystery is satisfying and leaves room for more intrigue in later installments of the series.
Engaging writing and noir overtones offset some problematic content in this clever detective story.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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