An involving mystery with humor, heart, and a strong sense of place.
The hunt is on for a rumored treasure chest that was stolen and buried 20 years ago in this sequel.
In the novel Tourist Town (2016), a woman with amnesia found herself on Nantucket. She adopted the name Verona and, though her memory was restored, she stayed on. For the last few years, she and her boyfriend, tour-bus driver Addie McDaniel, have lived happily in their friend Clarence “Digit” Hathaway’s spacious house. But—with the couple’s relationship heading toward the next level—it’s now time to get a cottage of their own. Needing an off-season job, Addie stumbles into one as a reporter for the local paper and discovers a hidden talent for nosing around. Chief C.C. Dennison of the Coast Guard, one source, informs Addie that an island exile named Dirk Caspian is back after 20 years, intent on digging up a protected marsh for bogus reasons. The chief also tells the tale of a 20-year-old mystery—the unsolved robbery of an old, locked sea chest. Secrets past and present swirl around Nantucket as interested parties search for the lost treasure, which is deeply connected to the island’s history. Sheppard gives an insider’s view of Nantucket that summer visitors never see, one that’s quieter, more intimate, and more genuine. The story has comedy and warmth, as with the tender Addie-Verona romance—but it would be a mistake to consider Nantucket as merely cozy. The island is also haunted by the inescapable brutalities of its whaling past, as with the old chest’s first owner, a whaling captain. Supernatural undercurrents, as enigmatic as the surrounding sea, touch Nantucket and its inhabitants as well.
An involving mystery with humor, heart, and a strong sense of place.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-30130-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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