Cole’s solid characters, sharp dialogue, and clever puzzle provide a recipe for more than just ziti.
A cooking school designer tries to keep murder from ruining a most expensive birthday gift.
Nell Valenti is pleased as punch that her renovation of Chef Claudio Orlandini’s cooking school is finally complete. Now the Villa Orlandini is ready to host the scads of gastro-tourists she hopes will flock to this picturesque estate at the edge of the quaint Tuscan village of Cortona, where Chef stands ready to teach them the secrets of Northern Italian cuisine. The first group through is far smaller than the usual dozen, not because the course is unpopular, but because the very rich Philip Copeland is willing to plunk down $75,000 to buy out the whole session so that his mother can spend her 80th birthday enjoying a set of semiprivate lessons on how to prepare her favorite food—ziti—in every way imaginable. It’s just Philip, his mom, and his mom’s best friend, Muffy Onderdonk, whose job is evidently to remind Mimi, who has mild dementia, that it’s Philip and not her other son, the late William, who’s hosting the trip. Taking immediately to what she calls the Copeland Party of Three, Nell does her best to make sure that the Ziti Variations live up to Mimi’s expectations, however fleetingly the octogenarian remembers them. So Nell is more than a little put out when the body of would-be real estate developer Renata Vitale is found on the edge of the olive orchard that borders the villa. Renata’s murder is a threat not only to the Ziti Variations, but also to Nell’s boyfriend, Pete Orlandini, who is Chef's son, the owner of the orchard, and the police chief’s favorite suspect in Renata's death.
Cole’s solid characters, sharp dialogue, and clever puzzle provide a recipe for more than just ziti.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-09783-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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