A neatly constructed whodunit punctuated by series regulars who periodically break in to speak their piece.
Ellen Curtis, whose profession is decluttering her clients’ homes, cleans up a lot more in her second case.
It’s ironic that Alexandra Richards wants SpaceWoman, Ellen’s company, to clean out her mother’s home in Brighton because Ingrid Richards herself seems to be the main thing clogging her daughter’s life. Ingrid has traveled the world as a flamboyant journalist, but she’s never taken proper responsibility for the daughter her brief relationship with fellow reporter Niall Connor left her with. Now that Niall has married celebrity Daily Mail columnist Grace Bellamy, everyone seems to be well over the birth of Alexandra, leaving Ingrid surrounded by unsorted papers and Alexandra left to solace herself with the smugly lukewarm endearments of computer repairman Walter Rainbird. Meantime, Ellen frets over the welfares of waitress Mary Griffin, whose abusive husband has been imprisoned since trashing her place, and her own children, remote, London-based Juliet and Nottingham Trent student Ben. Brett’s exposition is a model of effortless efficiency. In no time at all, he sketches out Ellen’s fraught relationship with the ex-actress mother she calls Fleur, details the 1986 hostage rescue in Beirut that left Ingrid scarred and BBC cameraman Phil Dickie crippled, traces Ellen’s uphill battle to declutter the household of widowed Edward Finch, who coyly intimates that he may have murdered his wife, kills off Ingrid in a sadly predictable house fire, and hints that her death may not have been accidental.
A neatly constructed whodunit punctuated by series regulars who periodically break in to speak their piece.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78029-128-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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