A somewhat odd caper with appealing leads and eccentric structural issues.
In Ruckus’ mystery novel, sleuths Chance Yang and his wife, Catherine, take on a murder case rooted in the deep past.
In a prologue, an unnamed man is in a hospital; his unnamed sister has died after leaving him cryptic notes urging him to find her killer. The story proper begins in London, with Chance and Catherine’s friends celebrating the opening of Chance’s restaurant. Chance and Catherine marry and head to China for their honeymoon, where the British-born Catherine can meet Chance’s family. Interspersed with their largely pleasant time there are flashback passages from 2005 hinting at something dire happening at a summer camp, accompanied by desperate but disembodied pleas for help. Back in the present, a series of violent deaths occur at an abandoned building site near the place where Chance and Catherine are staying. They're galvanized into action, and the duo piece together what happened back in the past to result in these deaths almost 20 years later. This is a strange book: Chance and Catherine are likable enough, a pair in the tradition of crime-solving husband-and-wife teams such as Nick and Nora Charles, but the action in the first few chapters, set in London, has almost nothing to do (save for the presence of An, Chance’s cousin) with the narrative that unfolds in China—the important part of the plot. Some developments feel like non sequiturs; readers will learn a lot about Chinese cuisine and customs (“By the time Chance returned, the girl was teaching Catherine tongue twisters and jingles in Chinese. ‘Try this. Hong fenghuang, fen fenghuang, fenhong fonghuang, huang fenghuang. This means red phoenix, pink phoenix, pinkish-red phoenix, and yellow phoenix’”). There is a leisurely pace to the proceedings that seems indulgent—at one point, Chance and Catherine both have colonoscopies (there’s a fun date), leaving readers to wonder what their medical procedures add to the story. But such things are a matter of taste, and there are surely readers who like to go with the flow, as it were.
A somewhat odd caper with appealing leads and eccentric structural issues.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781916572249
Page Count: 313
Publisher: UK Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
