A surfeit of suspects in a charming mystery filled with quirky characters whose Southern roots influence their daily lives.
A woman fights to keep her restaurant afloat against all odds.
Savvy Summers’ family was part of the Black migration from Mississippi to Chicago, and it’s her great-aunt Essie’s recipes that make Sapphire Summers Soulfood Café and Catering Company, aka Essie’s, a hit. At the 50th anniversary party Savvy and her sous-chef, Penny, cater for Matilda and Grandy Jaspers, the food disappears faster than you can say “soul food.” But the gossip and longtime grudges that hang over the event make Matilda unhappy. Grandy, still bitter over disputed songwriting credits, is unashamed when pregnant young Shysteen Shackleford shows up, hinting that Grandy might be the father. The next morning, Grandy shows up at Essie’s looking ill, and after breakfast, he falls over dead. By the time Savvy caters the funeral, rumors are already spreading that her sweet potato pie was the cause of his death. To top it off, the Department of Health shuts down Essie’s while they investigate. But Savvy’s not about to give up, even though Noble McPherson keeps pressuring her to sell the restaurant and franchise it as a soul food brand. Savvy’s still suspicious about Grandy’s death, and the official ruling of heart failure doesn’t revive the business. To make matters worse, her alderman, Delbert Daily, who’s already under investigation for a multitude of crimes, won’t help her. When the real cause of Grandy’s death turns out to be an overdose of Viagra, Savvy turns to her ex-husband, police officer Fanon, and his ex-partner for help deciding which of a long list of people most wanted Grandy dead.
A surfeit of suspects in a charming mystery filled with quirky characters whose Southern roots influence their daily lives.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781250351906
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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