A folksy, slightly formulaic crime novel set in mid-century Virginia.
A haunted vet plays private investigator in Gates’ debut crime novel.
King George County, Virginia, 1959: World War II vet Harry Cogbill has just lost his job at the pickle factory due to his disrespectful attitude and short temper. He’s been battling a recent case of insomnia, which means he’s awake when a woman pulls up to his house shortly after dawn. Ethel Burkitt, a 20-something local farmer’s daughter, wants to hire Harry as a private investigator—a job for which his only qualification is that he was once a prison guard. It seems Ethel’s uncle, Jack Pope, is selling the family’s small, rural airport, and Ethel doesn’t like the look of the men who are trying to buy it. Harry agrees to look into it—he’s got a bit of a crush on Ethel from the start, and he hasn’t got much else going on aside from caring for the fox cub he just adopted. As Harry starts inquiring into the sale of the airfield, it’s clear that everyone he speaks to is lying to him…and a few go so far as to threaten him. With fears of the Greek mafia’s incursion into the Northern Neck and his feelings for Ethel growing by the day, Harry sets out to prevent the Burkitts from losing their land—and their lives. But will the traumas of his wartime past prevent him from taking action? Gates writes with a great sense of local color and humor. When an outsider asks Harry, “What you guys do for fun around here? You got like, barn dances and stuff?” the protagonist deadpans, “You’re thinking of Oklahoma…This is Virginia. We mostly grow tobacco and write the Declaration of Independence.” Harry certainly fits an archetype, and much of the plot, like his and Ethel’s immediate attraction, feels a bit too preordained. Even so, plenty of readers will be attracted to this Southern tale of a broken man with something to prove and a reason for proving it.
A folksy, slightly formulaic crime novel set in mid-century Virginia.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2019
ISBN: 9780359440382
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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