An absorbing murder mystery with a unique twist and a poignant look at grief.
When her mother dies under suspicious circumstances, a woman is haunted by a fictional character.
Niamh Morrissey is mourning her crime novelist mother, Annie, who died after falling off a ladder while doing home repairs at her rural English cottage. The most difficult part for Niamh is that she and her mother weren’t speaking—they’d had a fight about the main character in Annie’s hit series, Leah Rebecca Overton, a “hotshot private investigator” who’s described as “chic, tall, and athletic.” She couldn’t be more different from Niamh, who often felt like a disappointment to her mother. Niamh would love to never think about Leah again…but then Leah shows up in Annie’s cottage, where Niamh has been staying to sort things out. She thinks there’s something suspicious about the way Annie died, and she isn’t leaving until they solve the mystery of her author’s death. She may be a fictional character (and she may not be visible to anyone but Niamh), but her desire to figure out what happened to Annie is real. Niamh has to admit that there are some things about her mother’s death that don’t add up, and with Leah’s often blunt help, she starts investigating. There are plenty of suspicious characters in her mother’s charming neighborhood—as well as people from the publishing world who may have had motive to get Annie out of the picture. Niamh will have to overcome her resentment toward Leah—as well as Leah’s abrasive attitude—if she wants to discover what really happened to her mother. Lotz creates a compelling mystery that’s also a genuinely touching look at grief. Annie’s career as a writer provides a fun meta touch, while Niamh and Leah make a charmingly mismatched crime-solving duo. And while the premise may involve a fictional character come to life, Niamh’s believable feelings about the loss of her mother keep the story grounded in reality.
An absorbing murder mystery with a unique twist and a poignant look at grief.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780593436790
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
