Too long by a couple of hundred pages but still skillfully told, with a constantly gleeful interest in human awfulness.
J.K. Rowling returns with the fifth of her Cormoran Strike series of detective thrillers, and the blood flows fast.
At the opening, we find Strike at a pub—he’s never far from an adult beverage—when he’s approached by a young woman with a strange tale. Her mother, Margot Bamborough, a general practitioner, disappeared from her clinic—in 1974. Strike, working his first cold case, Googles the doctor’s name only to find that her disappearance had aspects in common with ones attributed to the very unpleasant Dennis Creed, who kidnapped, raped, murdered, and beheaded his victims—sometimes, in a choice that will raise red flags coming from Rowling, while dressed in women's clothes. Now locked away, Creed is just one of the suspects who emerges in the course of Rowling’s overlong but propulsive yarn, each of whom seems to have the job of pulling Strike away from the elusive truth. Fortunately, he has Robin Ellacott, his associate, to get him back on course: He is the muscle and the mover, prosthetic leg notwithstanding, but Robin has a talent for ferreting just the right bits of information out of people. And what people there are: a supposedly drug-addicted colleague of Margot's; the son of a cop who investigated the disappearance and slowly went mad in the process, leaving notebooks of speculation behind that increasingly turned toward the astrological and supernatural; prostitutes and minor drug dealers; a young man with a penchant for animal abuse; a philandering fellow, several of whose girlfriends wind up inconveniently dead; even a couple of vicious gangsters. Then there’s Creed himself, a minor Hannibal Lecter whom Strike takes pleasure in deflating: “She was murdered by a far more skillful killer than you ever were,” he tells the psychopath. Ouch! After wading through a barrel of red herrings, Rowling—beg pardon, Galbraith—delivers the real killer, the least obvious of the lot, and it’s a masterful, perfectly thought-through revelation.
Too long by a couple of hundred pages but still skillfully told, with a constantly gleeful interest in human awfulness.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49893-7
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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