A quirky murder mystery with a wonderful sense of place.
In Lane’s debut, an unlikely criminal pursues a murderer in his court-appointed small town.
Giles Anthony Maurice Gibson, president of ABC Toys, is held liable when a child chokes to death on one of the loosely attached eyes of ABC’s Poppy Panda doll. The judge sentences him to a year of community service—not in New York, where he lives, but in the dead child’s hometown of Motte and Bailey, Oregon. He soon finds himself a resident of room 202 in the Sleepy Time Motel, washing dishes at the Sunnyside Up café, and wearing an ankle bracelet that ensures he doesn’t leave town. Luckily, none of the locals know why he’s there; the girl’s family has since moved away, and everyone he meets knows him by his new nickname, Tony. As he waits for someone to give him his community service assignment, Tony passes time among his new coworkers, including the no-nonsense cafe owner, the beleaguered waitress, and the grizzled cook with the unlikely name of Walt Whitman. Soon after Tony’s arrival, Walt discovers a dead body in the dumpster behind the restaurant. Instead of alerting the police, Walt dragoons Tony into burying the body in the woods. Soon the Sunnyside Up is under investigation, and if Tony can’t figure out the identity of the murderer, he’s going to wind up with a much harsher sentence than community service. Lane is a talented stylist, and her prose glistens as she describes the picturesque environs of Motte and Bailey: “The tyrant sun made diamonds on the water. The golden fields around the reservoir gave the impression of plenty…Behind it all, the Blue Mountains made a graceful and glorious backdrop, not judgmental now, just a thing of beauty.” The real pleasures, though, are the deftly rendered characters (all characters in the true sense) and their relationships with one another. This is a comic novel with a big heart.
A quirky murder mystery with a wonderful sense of place.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781952232862
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Golden Antelope Press
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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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