An amusing mystery with enough genuine peril to keep readers intrigued.
In this novel, an author-turned-screenwriter’s search for a missing actor is one for the books.
Not for nothing does Charlie McGinley love the Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels. Like the film’s fictional director who no longer wishes to make frivolous comedies, McGinley wants to wash his hands of Johnny Dent, the phenomenally popular literary detective he created and on whose book sales he relies to take care of three ex-wives. Does he have the Great American Novel in him? The jury is out. Until then, he is racked with writer’s block on his seventh Dent mystery, which his publisher eagerly awaits. But life imitates art when McGinley, hired to adapt his recent book for the movies, is drawn into a mystery that sounds like the plot of one of his novels. The film’s star has vanished after clashing with the director. The star’s wife, a beautiful but faded actor who just happens to be McGinley’s former fiancee, is a prime suspect. She wants his help, much to the increasing displeasure of McGinley’s current wife. He assures his wife that he is only going to ask a few questions. “You know how people usually react when you ask questions?” she responds. “They have a tendency to pull guns and try to shoot you.” Indeed, Ben, the ghost of a Navajo shaman with whom McGinley commiserates, warns him: “Bad things are about to start happening, and you’re gonna be right in the middle of ’em.” Ingraffia’s second McGinley mystery is a brisk and breezy read. It could be sharper in its wit and menace, but McGinley is an eminently likable protagonist with a lot of baggage, including his Native American mother, an 18-year-old runaway who abandoned him when he was young (“He would have loved to talk to her about her decision, but she died of a drug overdose when she was nineteen”). Still, Ben may be a bridge too far for readers who resist digressions into magical realism.
An amusing mystery with enough genuine peril to keep readers intrigued.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 9798359140836
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Blue Telescope Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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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