Proverbial skeletons in closets and actual ones buried in the yard help make this a bone-ified good mystery.
In Ingraffia’s novel, a successful writer of mysteries finds himself at the center of a real one when he unearths a human skull in his front yard.
In this third installment of the author’s Charlie McGinley Mystery series, Charlie attempts to plant a tree in his New Mexico front yard because his jazz-loving adoptive father, Buddy, says that “planting a tree when you have a kid is good luck.” Charlie’s wife (his third), Mickey, is expecting their second child in a matter of months. But instead of resulting in luck, Charlie’s digging produces a skull, and when a team of authorities gets involved, they find more bones, including two additional skulls, each with a bullet hole in the back. Walter Reddeck, the mayor of the tiny town of Coyote Falls, is part of the investigative team, as is Professor Malia Chee, the youngest tenured instructor in the Forensic Anthropology Department at the University of New Mexico, and its only Indigenous woman. Also present is Connie Cruz, editor of the local paper, and an ex-friend of Chee’s for reasons unknown. Because Charlie is accustomed to researching the books he writes, he works to solve his front yard mystery. But Chee warns him repeatedly to back off, especially when he comes up with a much more recent date for the killings than she does. In addition to his research, Charlie is guided by Ben, his long-dead Navajo spirit guide. Charlie also talks about the case to his dead birth mother, a Navajo “dream talker.” Some readers may be turned off by the inclusion of not-of-this world characters who help solve the mystery, but others will enjoy the book’s magical realism. The human characters are fleshed out and often humorous until turning deadly. The backstory could be trimmed, but in general, the pacing is good, and painterly descriptions of the area are woven throughout the narrative. Although this novel is part of a series, it could stand as a read-alone.
Proverbial skeletons in closets and actual ones buried in the yard help make this a bone-ified good mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9798864683156
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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