An intriguing whodunit with memorable characters.
In Bacon’s novel, a 38-year-old New Yorker’s friend is murdered, and she soon discovers the many secrets she was keeping.
It’s 1987: Andy Warhol has recently died, the Iran-Contra Affair is on the news, and artist Seal Larson lies dead on Manhattan concrete. Emma Quinn, a history professor at Columbia University, had found a lot of common ground with Seal, her 30-something neighbor. Like Emma, the visual artist lived alone, and she shared Emma’s passion for art, music, and nightlife. The academic had thought that they were great friends and trusted each other, but upon Seal’s sudden, violent death, she learns her friend’s real name: Lucille Lawson. Emma’s determined to find justice for the friend she thought she knew—even if she must dive into years of secrets. Helping Emma investigate are her friend Bill Kidman, who’s with the CIA, and her boyfriend, Angus McLearan of British intelligence. Emma finds out Seal’s mother, an art collector, wasn’t living in England, nor was she estranged from her daughter; she actually died years ago from cancer and was originally from Tennessee. Seal—or rather, Lucille—has just one living relative, her Aunt Jenny. As Emma digs into Seal’s connection to Warhol, and her unexpected financial situation, she comes closer to finding a solution to the mystery. Bacon expertly interweaves details of the time period into the characters’ backstories, with Seal effectively narrating the story of her life in some chapters: “I wonder. Will anyone even care that I’m gone?” Emma’s chapters, told from the third-person perspective, feel as if one is observing a real person, and they effectively show her trying to find her friend’s killer while also dealing with the political atmosphere in which her friends live. The mystery is compelling and takes unexpected turns, and it’s supported by a steady pace and unique characters. Bacon also provides a satisfying ending—not only to the mystery, but also to a subplot involving Emma’s personal life.
An intriguing whodunit with memorable characters.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781733082761
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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