Followers of Priscilla thus far will find this star-studded ’60s era mystery groovy.
Things are stompin’ at the Savoy when a mythical curse rears its deadly head at the legendary London hotel in Base and Emery’s mystery novel.
London in the 1960s is swinging, and Priscilla Tempest, head of the Savoy’s press office, is keeping stellar company. She’s been invited to a soon-to-be-notorious dinner in the hotel’s swank Pinafore Room, hosted by none other than legendary director Orson Welles. The guest list includes Noël Coward, Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant (who takes a bit of a shine to Priscilla), Lord Mountbatten, the scandalous Christine Keeler, Fleet Street maven Jack Cogan—aka “the Jackal”—and Lady Anne Harley, a valued Savoy regular whose son is a distinguished diplomat. (The diners are “impressive for their various levels of celebrity even within the hard-to-impress confines of the Savoy.”) Much to Welles’ displeasure, his showmanship is upstaged when Coward regales the table with a tale of a supposed Savoy curse: If a dinner party has 13 guests, the first to leave will suffer an untimely end. “Poppycock,” declares Lady Anne, who is the first to leave. The next morning, she’s found dead of a sudden heart attack, and her son, who is something of a bounder, is nowhere to be found. Adding to the cursedness is the non-fatal stabbing of Cogan in his hotel room. News of the curse could be damaging to the hotel’s peerless reputation, so Priscilla is directed by the Savoy’s general manager in no uncertain terms to nip this hex business in the bud. This fourth installment in the Priscilla Tempest Mystery series by Base and Emery (who is the real-life inspiration for Priscilla) is a breezy read with a glamorous cast of iconic characters that expands to include Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, a jazz club owner, an American blackmailer, and the Queen herself. The dialogue doesn’t quite capture, say, Coward’s legendarily biting wit or Welles’ imperiousness, but Priscilla is an entertainingly plucky and resourceful heroine.
Followers of Priscilla thus far will find this star-studded ’60s era mystery groovy.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781771624381
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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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