An intriguing, tense, and entertaining read, with a sturdy female protagonist.
When a young female welder dies in a shipyard accident, a reporter suspects foul play in Blanton-Stroud’s mystery novel.
On Saturday, November 7, 1942, the Lowe Shipyard in Richmond, California is buzzing with excitement. Owner Adam Lowe is about to announce a contest, a challenge for his workers to build the next Liberty Ship in less than one week, beating the 10-day record recently set by the Lowe Portland shipyard up north. Plus, Adam has just hired, for the first time, women welders for the Richmond yard. This second part of the announcement is met with decidedly less enthusiasm. Jane Benjamin, gossip columnist for the local San Francisco Prospect, is there to cover the event. As the ceremony draws to a close, whistles and a horn sound from Yard Two of the complex. Jane follows her instincts and runs toward the whistle. There she sees the lifeless body of a young woman, Jeannie Lyons, her hand curled around a welding wand (“She lay at the base of a U-shaped concrete deck, facing the watery bays where five partly built ships lined up, the middle bay empty, like a missing tooth”). The death is declared to be work-related, resulting from carelessness and inexperience. Ambitious and intrepid, Jane has an idea to patriotically promote the replacement of soon-to-be-drafted male workers with women who can contribute to the war effort. The shipyard will run a contest to select a poster girl—Wendy the Welder—and Jane will have a career-boosting story. This third volume in the Jane Benjamin series gradually builds its way into an action-packed thriller as Jane races to uncover the nefarious doings at the shipyard before she becomes one of the victims. Intermingled with the sinister plotline are the politics, prejudices, and societal restrictions of the period, issues that lamentably still have currency. Appearances by notorious columnist Hedda Hopper add a realistic touch to the media frenzy, as well as some satisfying levity. Lively prose, enjoyably edgy dialogue, and a delightful, unconventional, feminist heroine add up to a captivating page-turner.
An intriguing, tense, and entertaining read, with a sturdy female protagonist.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781647425937
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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