Strong female characters and engaging historical nuggets result in a satisfying read.
A young widow fights her late husband’s family and social convention to retain control of his struggling San Francisco newspaper in Blanton-Stroud’s historical novel.
When Edward Zimmer died suddenly of a heart attack, he left his 29-year-old wife Sandy his 35% share of the San Francisco Prospect, as well as his position as the twice-daily newspaper’s publisher. But in the three years since, it is her father-in-law Wyatt Zimmer and the board of directors who have assumed the roles of decision-makers. Now, Wyatt wants to sell the paper, a business venture he had always opposed. However, today, VJ day, is a time to celebrate: The Second World War has finally ended with the unconditional surrender of Japan. The streets of San Francisco are filled with revelry, but the abundance of alcohol is resulting in dangerously drunken crowds that are causing mayhem. When Wyatt denigrates her ability to run the paper in front of the board, she decides to investigate for herself what is happening on the streets. Sandy observes that the police are outnumbered and the hospitals are overrun—the city’s powers-that-be have been caught flatfooted. At least six rape victims are treated at the hospital, and there are 13 deaths. What she experiences and learns during this night of violence transforms her. Blanton-Stroud’s engaging narrative is a follow-up to her earlier Jane Benjamin novels about a hard-nosed, intrepid reporter at the Prospect, and Jane returns here to play a pivotal role in Sandy’s development from an insecure people-pleaser into a dynamic force in the male-dominated publishing industry. Determined to get justice for the rape victims and accountability from government officials (“all of them should face consequences for their actions or inactions”), Sandy compellingly finds her voice and her backbone as she battles Wyatt and the board for control of the paper. Inspired by oft-ignored historical details from the 1945 riots, Blanton-Stroud has composed a well-paced, edgy tale that is a salute to solid, honest journalism.
Strong female characters and engaging historical nuggets result in a satisfying read.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429461
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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