Bonus: those New Zealand landscapes the victim seemed determined to destroy.
Forensic odontologist Alexa Glock, already transplanted from Raleigh, North Carolina, to Auckland, continues to reach beyond her professional credentials in her fourth case.
Tony Cobb, the caretaker at Black Reef estate, has found a body in its survivalist bunker whose face has been rendered unidentifiable by maggots. It can’t be that of Harlan Quinn, the Silicon Valley billionaire who owns the New Zealand estate, because his wife, Audrey, reports from California that he’s in Germany. So the first mystery to solve is the identity of the corpse, and that’s why Alexa’s boyfriend and sometime collaborator, DI Bruce Horne, who just happens to be passing through, calls her in. Even after Alexa conclusively identifies the dead man as Harlan Quinn, his wife continues to maintain that he’s in Germany, and a new mystery quickly sprouts: How did he die? The fact that Alexa’s formidable forensic skills don’t throw any light on this second riddle doesn’t prevent her from inserting herself into the investigation, with the full approval of Bruce and DI Micala Steele, who’s officially in charge of the case. Once the police, with unexpected assistance from Alexa, establish the cause of death, they can finally get down to the question of who killed the billionaire, whose obsession with maintaining his privacy seems to have rubbed off on everyone who served him, including the mistress he cheated on Audrey with and the other lover he cheated on the mistress with. Though Quinn’s seigneurial indifference to people he’s not trying to bed makes the riddle of whodunit the least interesting of the three mysteries, there’s much to enjoy, especially in the first half of this tale, and readers who check out early won’t have to worry about what they’re missing.
Bonus: those New Zealand landscapes the victim seemed determined to destroy.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781728257341
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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