An engaging and loving look at small-town Southern life with an appealing sleuth.
A “star reporter”—on the scene when a crashed Cessna explodes—sees a man run from the disaster and is determined to discover his identity and what caused the plane to blow up.
In McCoy’s debut mystery, journalist Daisy McLaren and photographer/videographer Jake Smith report on a plane crash on a remote mountain near the town of Franklin, North Carolina. Daisy sees a man race from the plane just as it explodes unexpectedly. She watches as he heads toward the Walker family’s farm. Daisy went to school with Caleb Walker “until tenth grade, when he just quit coming.” She always found the Walkers “strange, and now she wondered whether they might have something to do with the plane crash.” When she ignores Jake’s warning not to visit the family by herself, she’s met with a pack of dogs and the gun-toting patriarch demanding she get off his land. Daisy’s mother died a few years earlier in a car accident near the mountain where the plane crashed. The reporter still tries to unravel details of the accident along with the mystery of the exploding plane. When she learns about an influx of heroin in town, Daisy suspects a connection to the plane. While gun shy about relationships with men, she does open her heart to a stray cat she names Rescue. In this series opener, the hero is heavily reminiscent of Nancy Drew; both have attorney fathers and dead mothers; both enjoy tooling around town, Daisy in a Jeep, Nancy in a roadster. Both have chaste relationships with their men—Daisy with Jake, Nancy with Ned Nickerson. But while Nancy is a New Englander, Daisy is a Southerner, like the author, and images of North Carolina’s forests, mountains, and small shops are inviting. Sections on Native American legends and lore add to the story, which takes place largely in Franklin, once home to the Cherokee Nation and other tribes. The mystery itself fails to be heart-pounding, but there is much sweetness in Daisy’s relationships with others and with Rescue, who curls “like a croissant” on the couch or “wreaths” herself on a bed pillow.
An engaging and loving look at small-town Southern life with an appealing sleuth.Pub Date: July 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-93085-5
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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