Average for Rendell’s distinguished list of whodunits, which makes it just a whisker below state of the art.
Inspector Reginald Wexford’s 20th case, and Rendell’s 64th volume, asks who murdered a pair of Kingsmarkham teens no better than they should have been.
Last June, a hooded figure tried to kill 18-year-old mother Amber Marshalson by tossing a block of concrete onto her car from an overpass. The resulting accident led to a fatality, but it wasn’t Amber. Now, two months later, the killer has struck more effectively. On the way home from the Bling-Bling Club, Amber’s been beaten to death with a brick that could have come from anywhere. As Wexford, DS Hannah Goldsmith and their colleagues (The Babes in the Wood, 2003, etc.) methodically begin to interrogate witnesses and potential suspects—the neighbors of Amber’s adoring father and hostile stepmother, the friends she went clubbing with, the well-connected family of her baby’s father—Rendell sets about bringing each of them to startling life. She lavishes equal care on the members of Wexford’s own family, led this time by his daughter Sylvia, who’s quixotically determined to carry a baby for her ex-husband, Neil, and his girlfriend, Naomi. Soon enough, the murderer claims a new victim, pregnant shop clerk Megan Bartlow, whose connection with Amber isn’t hard to find. But it’ll be months before Wexford emerges from an intricate web of red herrings to identify a sadly amateurish scam and a surprising killer.
Average for Rendell’s distinguished list of whodunits, which makes it just a whisker below state of the art.Pub Date: July 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33976-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
A murder is committed in a stalled transcontinental train in the Balkans, and every passenger has a watertight alibi. But Hercule Poirot finds a way.
**Note: This classic Agatha Christie mystery was originally published in England as Murder on the Orient Express, but in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. Kirkus reviewed the book in 1934 under the original US title, but we changed the title in our database to the now recognizable title Murder on the Orient Express. This is the only name now known for the book. The reason the US publisher, Dodd Mead, did not use the UK title in 1934 was to avoid confusion with the 1932 Graham Greene novel, Orient Express.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1934
ISBN: 978-0062073495
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1934
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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