An ambitious if awkward attempt at genre hopping.
A murder victim prompts a stay-at-home dad to play gumshoe in this darkly comic yarn.
Peter Greene, the narrator of Garonzik’s debut novel, is disheartened. A recent layoff from his finance job has left him with little to do but ferry his 3-year-old son, Luke, to appointments and run an endless-seeming series of errands for his wife, Lauren. At Lauren’s prompting, they’ve left city life for a coastal town whose sole virtue is the opportunity to indulge his love of surfing. On the beach he meets Robert Townsend, a former colleague, who turns up dead on the sand a week later. With few places to apply his analytical skill and feeling emasculated by his employment status, he begins following leads. What kinds of nefarious deeds was his old firm up to, what brought Robert to that wind-wracked beach, and why are so many people trying to keep him from asking questions? Garonzik strives to make Pete into the kind of sad-sack dad who’s populated novels by Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart, and Teddy Wayne, capturing the adult male put upon by daily responsibilities; a request from Lauren to pick up milk prompts a catastrophic overreaction: “Chernobyl. All is lost. Game over.” And he sees the comic absurdities of parenting a toddler, a feeling intensified by Pete’s taking Luke to grown-up locales like bars and police stations. In time, Pete learns that Robert’s fate is simpler and sadder than his earnest dot-connecting effort suggests, but by that point Garonzik has still struggled to establish a voice for the novel, which sits awkwardly between detective story and man-child bildungsroman. Pete’s complaints about Lauren are meant to comically expose a certain narcissism, but she rarely rises above a hectoring harridan. Plotlines about the finance world slow the pace, and the mood of self-deprecation tends to devolve into general sourness.
An ambitious if awkward attempt at genre hopping.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781538743362
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
