A big-tent extravaganza in more ways than one.
Hayden McCall, a Seattle middle school teacher and gay dating blogger, gets involved with the pansexual crew that runs a circus troupe.
Magician Kennedy Osaka, the new artistic director of Mysterium, a contemporary circus, has big plans to make it more exciting. Meanwhile, Hayden and his friend Hollister are treated to tickets to a VIP preview show by his neighbor Sarah Lee, Kennedy’s old college roommate, who can’t make it herself because she’s getting ready for a fundraiser for Bakers Without Borders, where Kennedy has agreed to perform the next night. Before the world can see whether the magician’s onstage chops are matched by her ability to herd Mysterium’s cats, her leadership is cut short: Sarah Lee finds her in her room at the Park Olympic Hotel, stabbed to death with a pair of designer scissors. The hotel’s security videos prove unhelpful, and the cops’ interest in the case is limited to suspecting Sarah Lee, so Hayden and Hollister decide to investigate on their own. Eventually their suspicions coalesce around three groups of possibles. Cowgirl comedian Kit Durango and hair-bun acrobat Yaz Smilova are the most likely candidates to succeed Kennedy as Mysterium’s director. Boris and Sasha Smilov, Yaz’s father and brother, are respectively the troupe’s owner and its head of operations. And Vlad Halep, along with Florin, Marku, and Stefan, his partners in the Romanian acrobatic group Adrenalin!, would catch anyone’s eye—especially Hayden’s, since he’s increasingly certain that Venezuelan dancer Camilo Rodriquez is never going to requite his love. Since Hayden and Hollister’s main approaches to sleuthing are making wrong guesses and spreading rumors designed to goad the killer into striking out at them, readers shouldn’t expect a densely plotted mystery. Like Mysterium, it’s best approached as an LGBTQ+ circus whose inclusiveness extends to the dead.
A big-tent extravaganza in more ways than one.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781639106479
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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