An appealing main character and a richly observed setting enliven a slow-paced whodunit.
A small-town reporter in a vibrant mountain town investigates a young girl’s death in Somers’ mystery sequel, following Eleven Stolen Horses (2024).
Somers returns to her Wild Horses Mystery series with a new case unfolding in Gold Strike, California, where reporter Eleanor Wooley works for the Gold Strike Tribune newspaper and lives with her dog, Granite. She’s called after a discovery of a dead body and a fire in the forest, a combination that immediately raises suspicions of foul play. The victim is a young woman, Marisol Teresa Rodriguez, and evidence soon mounts that she was indeed murdered. The case comes nearly one year after Eleanor’s close friend Rette disappeared, leaving trauma that still lingers as she reports on another violent mystery. As Eleanor digs deeper, she grows closer to her boyfriend, Easton Jode, a local rancher who helps her process a past toxic relationship; the two find connection in their mutual love of horses and shared outrage over “kill buyers” hauling horses to Mexico or Canada for slaughter, which previously led them to illegally free Bureau of Land Management mustangs from a kill pen. Eleanor also befriends McKenzie Wilson, a local barista whom the reporter describes as “a Western cowgirl goddess.” Meanwhile, unease spreads through Gold Strike as a development threatens to put “yet another perfect natural landscape…on the cusp of obliteration,” and locals fear Marisol’s murder may be the first of many. Somers excels at balancing the allure of nature and its uneasy dangers, as when a bear chases Eleanor and Granite moments after the reporter admires dogwoods blooming “like fairy lanterns” in the forest. She also weaves in the community’s shifting politics, setting Eleanor’s progressive values against those of an increasingly paranoid population. The protagonist’s romance with Easton is also tender and compelling, but the central mystery sometimes becomes secondary to accounts of daily mountain life—an imbalance that may frustrate readers seeking more suspense, even though the protagonist remains engaging throughout.
An appealing main character and a richly observed setting enliven a slow-paced whodunit.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798897400102
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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