This solid whodunit revels in its Southern flair and boasts a wonderfully nimble storyline.
A fatal aviation accident begins to look like a homicide in Arnold’s mystery novel.
Special Agent Dani York from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation heads to Tick County to look into a homicide. That’s where a local deputy has discovered the severed head of one of two missing men who’d been on a fishing trip. Searching Tick Springs Lake for further signs of the men and their boat, Dani turns up something even more shocking: A crashed plane at the lake’s bottom. The pilot, Hope Tucker, is also found dead, still in the pilot’s seat. Federal Aviation Administration Inspector Pat McNeil joins the investigation, and though the crash looks like an accident, Dani sticks around. Oddly enough, evidence suggests that Hope had died before the plane even took off. The case leads to Tucker Aviation, and the now widowed owner—Hope’s husband, David Tucker—quickly falls under suspicion for not reporting the aircraft missing. Dani interviews several individuals, including David’s son, the Tuckers’ nanny, and a pastor at the local church where partier-turned-worshipper Hope has donated quite a bit of money. Dani and Pat zero in on David, as his first wife, who died a year earlier, has a peculiar connection to Hope’s death. “I follow evidence,” Dani says, and that marks many others as murder suspects until she can rule them out. So, she continues to ask questions, dig for possible motives, and consider various scenarios to explain how a killer might have done it, all the while keeping pesky reporters at bay.
Arnold delivers out a tautly written Southern mystery. The Tennessee backdrop is vividly rendered, from the intense humidity (temperatures, despite recurrent rainstorms, rarely cool off) to the locals’ preferred elixir of bourbon. The author keeps the plot moving via dialogue that pops and relatively brief scenes. Arnold’s descriptions are vibrant without sacrificing conciseness: “The first drops hit in large, scattered splotches in the dry dirt, sending up puffs of dust. The team broke into a trot, then ran for their cars, most making it before sheets of rain blurred the horizon.” Dani is methodical in her investigation—the procedural aspects of the story feel authentic as she interviews people multiple times and scrutinizes details of the case. While she’s unquestionably attracted to the lanky, robust Pat, their engaging relationship is built on mutual respect. The rest of the cast is just as engaging, including a Tucker Aviation flight instructor, Hope’s unassuming mother (and straight-shooting grandmother), and Shelby County’s razor-sharp district attorney. Many of these characters are introduced as part of the murder investigation, but their distinctive lives and temperaments are well-developed. Although readers will guess some of the mystery’s turns, there are several surprises throughout, including the big reveal. The author rounds out this tale with a cynical take on the media—intermittent news articles come from two specific news sources that, despite covering the same story, are drastically different in their takes.
This solid whodunit revels in its Southern flair and boasts a wonderfully nimble storyline.Pub Date: July 10, 2025
ISBN: 9798290185811
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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