A highly stylized, quick-witted mystery with attractive characters and an effective postwar plot.
An American woman in London after World War II unravels the suspicious circumstances of her husband’s death in this novel.
Texas native Eve Battersby has been wed three times, but her last marriage lasted just a short while. Otis Battersby, the owner of a successful clothing company on London’s Savile Row, collapsed and died at his athletic club from sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 42. Eve stands to inherit a fortune from his death but is puzzled by the unexpected event. She begins to notice that inconsequential items are disappearing from her home, and she thinks she’s being followed. She also finds some curious things that seemingly belonged to Otis: Spanish passports, Swiss bonds, and portrait photographs. Needing to get away from the perceived threat, Eve fills her coat with cash, packs a suitcase, and boards a train to Edinburgh, Scotland. In her compartment, she meets Harry Douglas, a dashing Canadian who used to work in wartime British intelligence but is now a gambler. Eve likes what she sees in Harry (“Tall, lean, eyes as blue as a Texas sky, and remarkably warm hands”). In Edinburgh, Eve learns more about Otis’ true self and realizes the city isn’t the safe haven she had hoped for. As sordid tales from the past emerge, Harry and Eve face mounting threats to their safety as they search for the truth. Turner’s sleek postwar mystery is fast-moving and highly polished, but it does not skimp on historical details. Real historical figures are convincingly woven into the plot as Eve and Harry dig up some of the shadier stories from the period when Nazis were absconding to Spain and Argentina. The suspense runs high in this novel, which has a strong cast, an unrelenting energy, and a consistent devotion to the truth. Some points are repeated, and there isn’t much here about Eve’s background, but there is a promised sequel.
A highly stylized, quick-witted mystery with attractive characters and an effective postwar plot.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2022
ISBN: 9780984723256
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Harry Douglas Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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