Sedate legal thrills set in allegedly quieter times and quarters that can still deliver unseemly jolts.
Sir Gabriel Ward’s second unofficial encounter with murder in London’s Inner Temple begins with several limbs before claiming any lives.
As 1901 passes into 1902, someone is marking the change by sending body parts with cheeky notes to barristers who live in London’s inner sanctum. Sir William Waring, Master Treasurer and head of the Inner Temple, receives the first note—“Can I give you a hand?” paired with an appropriate parcel. Publicity hound Sir Edward Hopkins gets “Don’t put your foot in it” and a skeletal foot. But the third delivery—“A word in your ear”—claims a living victim in Reverend Master Hugh Vernon-Osbert, of the Temple Church, who suffers a fatal heart attack in response. Gabriel, meanwhile, has been sought out by Topsy Tillotson, a chorus girl turned musical star, to prosecute her libel case against Lionel Sullivan’s scruffy tabloid Nation’s Voice, which has announced that she’s surrendered her virtue to the Hon. Frederick Sewell, a man-about-town she claims she’s never met. Gabriel will work once more with PC Maurice Wright on both cases, linking one of them to a 10-year-old murder, as all parties, especially Gabriel himself, strive to keep their upper lips stiff. The setting, the characters, the tone, and the methodical dispersal of clues to the sins the stuffy cast is hiding are well up to the high bar of Gabriel’s debut in A Case of Mice and Murder (2025); only the final unmasking of the eminently predictable killer falls short.
Sedate legal thrills set in allegedly quieter times and quarters that can still deliver unseemly jolts.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781639737178
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Raven Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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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