An engrossing and provocative mystery, told from multiple perspectives.
Daley offers an arresting whodunit about a Washington, D.C., surgeon whose life is upended by a shocking murder and his own preoccupation with finding the killer.
Some people are cursed with anxiety over life’s uncertainties, and Liam O’Keefe, an accomplished surgeon, is a card-carrying member of that club. He’s right at home in the operating room, where he’s fully in control, but not so much at his actual home, where he lives with his investigative journalist wife, their three young sons, and their dog, Charlie (who’s a significant character in his own right). Not that anyone could blame O’Keefe for his anxiety: His adoptive parents perished in a car crash for which he feels responsible. It’s easy to imagine his torment when someone extremely close to him is murdered (for which he also feels responsible), and the two D.C. cops assigned to the case prove staggeringly ineffectual. The remaining two-thirds of the novel is devoted to O’Keefe’s fierce determination to expose the killer. Daley neatly slips in italicized chapters from the anonymous killer’s point of view, which truncate the list of suspects to three people, and then two. Even then, the suspense is palpable, the mystery engaging, and the characters complex and well-defined; the latter include some of O’Keefe’s old college friends, whose presence gives the story a dash of The Big Chill. Daley’s prose is mostly crisp and unadorned, although he does wax poetic about streetlights, of all things: “I can see the streetlight ahead glowing through the misty night, a beacon guiding me, pulling me forward. I think about the nights as a boy, staring out into the mist, into the uncertainty of the night at the lone streetlight. . .something I could trust that helped me gain my balance, kept me afloat in a world where I had no control.” Mystery buffs—especially those who enjoy whodunits set in urban milieus—will be thoroughly engaged as they ride shotgun on O’Keefe’s mission to bring the culprit to justice.
An engrossing and provocative mystery, told from multiple perspectives.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781038349408
Page Count: 294
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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