So many crimes and misdemeanors that you’ll need a score card. Nice local color, though.
Now that she’s quit her job as a homicide detective on Long Island, Maggie D’arcy assumes her long summer vacation in West Cork will be free of past entanglements. As if.
Maggie’s 17-year-old daughter, Lilly, instantly spots a spectral figure in the window of the cottage they’re renting on the grounds of Rosscliffe House with Maggie’s sweetie, history professor Conor Kearney. The logical candidate is Dorothea Reynolds, a governess to the children of the Crawford family, who vanished from Rosscliffe Manor in 1973. Maggie and Conor’s landlady, Lissa Crawford, a painter who grew up in the manor but sold the big house, is unhappy because she thought Dublin banker Lorcan Murphy and local builder Sam Nevin would refurbish the place, not turn it into a hotel. The customary squabbles between haves and have-lesses are upstaged at least briefly by the discovery on Crescent Beach of the late Lukas Adamik, a Pole who worked for Nevin before he too went missing. The news of his death, which everyone hopes will provide closure for his girlfriend, Zuzanna Brol, instead serves as a prelude to her own drowning. Did she fall, or was she pushed? Though DS Ann Tobin of the Garda Síochána is mourning the fatal overdose of her son, she seems perfectly competent. Even so, Maggie can’t resist taking time out from fretting about Conor’s ex and Lilly’s romance with Lukas’ friend Alex Sadowski to ask a few questions, and then a few more. The two women uncover a diffuse web of intrigue that implicates so many suspects it’s a relief when one of them is finally arrested.
So many crimes and misdemeanors that you’ll need a score card. Nice local color, though.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25082-665-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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