A worthwhile conspiracy tale despite its literary flaws.
An amateur detective investigates a seditious plot orchestrated by right-wing extremists in this mystery.
Miranda Davis lives a modestly ordinary life as a small-town realtor in North Carolina. But she garners some minor acclaim as an “intrepid amateur sleuth” when she solves a murder mystery involving a “poisoned pen perpetrator.” Her new reputation is likely the reason why her cousin Skip—they grew up together in Indiana—seeks her out with a peculiar problem: He believes he has inadvertently stumbled on a terrorist conspiracy. He reveals that while working at a radio station in New York City, he began to mockingly echo the doomsday pronouncements of colleague and “ultra right-wing pundit” Russ Mathews. Unfortunately, he must have struck a chord with someone—he started receiving threatening messages and believed he was being watched. He also noticed suspicious, if heavy-handed, clues on Mathews’ desk—a note referring to “D-Day minus four” and a red pushpin marking the area on a map where the 9/11 memorial sits. Miranda is understandably incredulous but begins to come around when her cousin is assaulted; his cat is kidnapped; and Mathews is spotted in the area stalking Skip. Frome constructs a complex and eventful mystery around Skip’s findings, one that increasingly relegates Mathews to a minor role but that may implicate President Harper. Harper apparently receives counsel from Lucian Clay, a right-wing political consultant “nostalgic for the 1950s and the days when women were content to take care of the home.” The plot can be bewildering—it is, as Miranda observes, sometimes an “impossibly foggy chase.” In addition, the tone of the work is uneven—it swings somewhat jarringly from being a “goofy escapade” to a chronicle of a “nefarious” conspiracy. Nevertheless, this is an intelligently conceived mystery and an entertaining one as well.
A worthwhile conspiracy tale despite its literary flaws.Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945448-57-7
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Boutique of Quality Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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