One of the weaker mysteries, but romantic tension and familiar characters—plus the promise of book 9—will offer fans enough.
Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott dodge Freemasons and MI6 as they work to uncover the identity of a mutilated body in a vault.
When a desperate woman with connections to high society contacts Strike with the rather odd request that he prove that a body found in a silver shop is that of her boyfriend, private investigator Strike and business partner Ellacott are drawn into a complex labyrinth of missing men, Masonic lore, illegal dog fights, and a variety of sex crimes. During the investigation, Strike is increasingly distracted by a journalist’s vendetta, and Robin, still dating a policeman and experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, by personal drama. London is cold and gritty; politicians are smarmy and corrupt; the upper crust is beautifully nasty; and Robin and Strike are madly in love with each other. Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), who never neglects an opportunity to drop an epigraph, leaves no stone unturned and no detail unexamined, but let’s be honest—by now, eight books and nearly 7,000 pages into the series, the mystery takes a backseat to the TV show–worthy stretch of “will-they-or-won’t-they” that has underpinned Strike and Robin’s relationship since the beginning. The solution to the crime is so complicated that it becomes nearly comical; instead, readers must wait, with bated breath, for the criminal to be revealed—hoping against hope all along that the detectives will find themselves, at last, alone, and will finally express their feelings at the same. damn. time. Robin is a strong and capable woman who has evolved in fascinating ways over the course of the series, and who is understandably suffering from the previous novel’s trauma, but here she is worn down by twin burdens of guilt and responsibility for the men in her life; even as she consistently stands up to blatantly awful male behavior from both suspects and witnesses, this feels like a frustrating step back.
One of the weaker mysteries, but romantic tension and familiar characters—plus the promise of book 9—will offer fans enough.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780316586009
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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