A competently constructed period thriller with all the trappings.
Edd’s 1947-set thriller features a gumshoe who could step right into the brogans of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade.
Into Mel Gance’s San Francisco office sidles Miss Cecilia Le Cleur, who had “all the curves of Lombard Street with no stop signs in sight.” The Le Cleurs are very rich, but her father, August, was found shot to death in his study, and her brother, Stephan, has disappeared. This is not the first tragedy to strike the family; years ago her mother and sister perished in a Paris hotel fire. Can Gance find her father’s killer and her missing brother? And is Cecilia a grieving orphan or a femme fatale—or a bit of both? August Le Cleur, a hotel developer, seemed like an upright businessman, but he had a weakness: He wanted to play on the wild side. He was connected to an illegal casino and to a gangster named Rolland Zaslow; their friendship had soured. In the tradition of the genre, Gance has a formidable sidekick, his secretary, Grace “Ace” Springfield, whose skills include more than typing and filing. Then there's cabbie Daphne Markos, who can crack wise and lose a tail on a moment’s notice (“You’re the boss, applesauce”). Of course, Mel winds up half in love with Cecilia, against all his better instincts. After many twists, turns, and red herrings, the real villain is finally exposed. Some readers may guess the ending intuitively, though the finer points may be lost despite Mel’s explications. The author is clearly having fun: She has written a legitimate whodunit but also a sendup of the genre. It’s an engrossing cable car ride, back in the world of Hammett and Chandler, with a world-weary shamus, cigarettes and fedoras, elegant and mysterious clients, and the fog always rolling in (this ain’t Fresno). Perhaps Edd will send Mel and Ace on more adventures…that would be just swell.
A competently constructed period thriller with all the trappings.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780990482529
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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