A fine whodunit full of satisfying twists, featuring a well-developed protagonist.
In Goldsmith’s mystery series starter,a troubled detective takes on the greatest investigation of his life.
The story begins on December 23 in the present day, as Mike Vogel, a lieutenant with the NYPD, is assigned to a big case. An attack’s taken place in The Spire, one of the tallest and most secure buildings in New York City. There, in the wealthy Grubb family’s penthouse, lie the dead bodies of Richard Grubb, a successful land developer; Val Grubb, his wife; Sabine LaCroix, who comes from a family of weapons manufacturers; and theirlawyer, Martin G. Katz. All four are connected to the infamous financier Andrew Levine, the late pedophile who was known for getting the privileged elite what they want. As the cops continue to sweep the penthouse, they locate a panic room, where Vogel finds and questions Derek Fawcett, the private security detail hired by author Olivia Hawthorne, who lives in the apartment below. Hawthorne penned Hero Cop, a book that accused Vogel of murdering his own wife, costing him his reputation and custody of his son. This turn of events triggers a flashback to September 11, 2001, when Vogel’s spouse went missing. The narrative also introduces a group named Talon, made up of ex-members of the Army, Navy, CIA, and FBI. During their own investigation, they aim to find videos that Levine made, complicating Vogel’s efforts. Goldsmith’s book contains some intriguing plot turns and some nice banter, especially in one of the last scenes between Vogel and Hawthorne, whose relationship goes through some significant changes. Throughout the story, the author takes time to focus on what Vogel is thinking and feeling, effectively immersing readers in the character’s mindset: “167 minutes. That’s the number of minutes Mike slept the previous night. Not surprising, all things considered. That said, he never slept much….Part of the job. The one advantage—the privilege of watching the sun rise.” The pacing, while initially stagnant, picks up quickly as the investigation reaches its climax.
A fine whodunit full of satisfying twists, featuring a well-developed protagonist.Pub Date: March 4, 2024
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 369
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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