The down-home setting and rat-a-tat dialogue help compensate for three cases that add up to one hot mess.
The two new partners in the S and M Detective Agency untangle a trio of unrelated cases.
Awakening from a coma to find that he’s been shot four times and is no longer an active member of the Olemeda (Florida) Police Department, Silas Jackson joins forces with Maggie Moore, a linguistic genius whose consultation with the department played a key role in identifying the pedophile who shot him, to open a private agency. Their first client, a guy named Mitch whose last name might as well be Bashful, isn’t eager to talk about anything, but eventually they prod him into telling the story of how a pickup at a local drag ball took him back to his hotel room, had his way with him, and vanished, taking his clothes but leaving him with a fresh tattoo on his butt. Naturally, Mitch won’t show them the tattoo, but he does share a selfie, and the shape looks just as inexplicable as he described—with one unusual feature they soon discover: Mitch hasn’t been tattooed but branded, along with three other guys in his online chat room. For a time, Mitch’s case distracts Maggie from her search for her best friend, Lucy, who vanished after leaving behind a cryptic clue Maggie hopes will help locate her. And since she’s otherwise unengaged, her success in uncovering an unsuspected cousin through a commercial DNA match makes her decide to hunt for the biological father who raped her late mother and moved on. If this sounds like quite the breakfast buffet, it is, and the three cases are constantly competing for the time and attention of Maggie, Silas, and the bemused reader.
The down-home setting and rat-a-tat dialogue help compensate for three cases that add up to one hot mess.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9780063475359
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.
Penny, who’s never met a story idea big enough to daunt her, unspools the endless puzzles surrounding a corpse whose identity isn’t known but whose status as a murder victim is clear.
“There’s a body in Lost Nation,” a dead-of-night telephone call informs Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide division at the Sûreté du Québec. Why is the informant calling Gamache’s personal line, and how did they get his number? For that matter, who placed the call? It certainly wasn’t Clara Morrow, the Gamaches’ neighbor and friend, whose phone seems to have been used by someone who visited her home. And where is Lost Nation? This last question, at least, yields an answer: It’s an Indigenous burial ground that’s been overgrown with trees and, more recently, a corpse too badly decomposed to be readily identified. An autopsy reveals that the victim was beaten to death. In the absence of further clues to his identity, Gamache and his colleagues focus on May 29, 1914, the date engraved on the otherwise unreadable headstone over the gravesite where the body was found. The trail to the killer leads back to a 1967 interview genealogist Jeannette Bouchard conducted with local historian Flossy Fuller the day before they were both killed in a car crash, and still further back to the real-life sinking of the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner as unfamiliar to Penny’s characters as it will be to most of her readers. Even after Gamache has arrested the responsible parties, the biggest riddle remains: the secret of the balefully ugly plant known as Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412607
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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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