A Victorian mystery whose many suspects might blur together if readers don’t pay close attention.
A summer sojourn on England’s North Devon coast leads Charlotte Holmes and Mrs. Watson into a family mystery.
Charlotte is enjoying a holiday in Devon with Mrs. Watson, Lord Ingram, and a group of family and friends when Mrs. Watson’s estranged sister, Justina Carstairs, the lady of a family of consequence, appears with ambiguous intentions. No sooner has she requested her sister’s presence at her home and suggested that something dangerous is imminent than she disappears, leaving her concerned husband and children baffled. A corpse who resembles her washes up nearby, but Mr. Carstairs insists it’s not his wife. Mrs. Watson and the intrepid band of sleuths led by Holmes and assisted by the police embark on a search for the missing Mrs. Carstairs and the identity of the corpse, as well as other missing women who may or may not have a connection to these events. Is the devoted Mr. Carstairs guilty of infidelity and murder? Did one of their children have an axe to grind? Is Moriarty making a new move in his game against Charlotte? The game is afoot and the players chase several threads over the countryside while Mrs. Watson swings between worry and suspicion of her sister’s ambitions and motives. This newest addition to the Lady Sherlock series is a soap opera blended with a “whodunwhat” puzzle that requires patience and attention to detail. The story introduces a bewildering number of characters in different locales, and belonging to different classes; the intricacies of their motives and the breadcrumbs Thomas scatters about their pasts will appeal to the British mystery and gothic fan, but romance readers might be disappointed at the dearth of scenes between Holmes and her lover, Lord Ingram. Passages on family dynamics and an occasional touch of melancholy show flashes of the author’s stylistic power and stiletto-like insights into love and heartache.
A Victorian mystery whose many suspects might blur together if readers don’t pay close attention.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780593640470
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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