An eclectic, compulsively readable detective yarn with a relatable old-school private eye hero at its center.
The murder of a Hollywood power couple is linked to an alleged drowning of a billionaire’s social media influencer daughter.
In the fifth book of Ellis’ Matt Jones thriller series, the 30-year-old LA homicide detective is called to the Brentwood home of A-list entertainment attorney Eli Stone and his partner, Dana Thatcher. Both Stone and Thatcher have been murdered but curiously met their demise in different ways: Thatcher was strangled, and Stone was shot three times in the back, with the killer being so close that Stone’s “jacket caught fire from the muzzle flash.” Lab work indicates that Thatcher’s killer was a woman: Bruises around the victim’s neck were made by someone with small hands wearing perfumed lotion. Jones learns that 10 years prior, the now-deceased couple were looking into the disappearance of social media star Faye Norwood, who mysteriously vanished on the night of the 18th birthday party she shared with her twin sister, Kelly. The party was held at the Hollywood estate of the girls’ billionaire father, James Norwood. Even though Faye’s corpse was found a month after her disappearance—turning up in a kelp forest off Morro Bay, California, her legs caught in fishing line—rumor had it that her quieter twin had killed her in a fit of jealousy. Jones suspects Kelly is the murderer and that her father is paying off a lot of people to keep things quiet. As Jones investigates further, murders in the area suddenly spike, putting added pressure on the detective to probe deeper—and more dangerously—into this roller-coaster case. Overall, this is a racy, enjoyable read; the author weaves a taut atmosphere, with unexpected but reasonably plausible twists and turns. Jones is not perfect, but that’s a strength here. He has a knack for getting into trouble and has fiery run-ins with the press and his supervisor, all of which makes for some good minor conflict to back up the main action.
An eclectic, compulsively readable detective yarn with a relatable old-school private eye hero at its center.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2026
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 366
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: today
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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