Colorful, bustling, and stuffed to the brim with endless complications and a throwaway killer.
Theophania Bogart, a fugitive from British high society, finds that her second case takes her outside her circle of friends but not out of her embattled San Francisco neighborhood.
Who could possibly have wanted to shoot attorney Katrina Dermody to death as she sat in the Tesla she’d made sure everyone in Fabian Gardens knew about? Theo, who discovers her body, knows she can start with the fellow tenants who opposed predatory developer Amos Noble’s determined attempt to plant a condo in the neighborhood. Her suspicions intensify when she insinuates herself into Katrina’s office and emerges with a folder documenting the juicy secrets of every tenant from Sabina Talbot, the daughter of anti-condo demonstrators Guillermo and Ruth D’Allessio (child out of wedlock), to wine company owners Jesus and Luis Aguardo (sale of liquor to teen who drank himself to death) to Angela Lacerda (high school abortion) to Theo herself, a photographer who changed her name and fled the press when her father, a noted English portraitist, stabbed her mother to death. As if that weren’t a rich enough field, a visit from priest/spymaster Sergei Wolf alerts Theo to the existence of a venerable espionage organization spanning generations whose members include both her beloved grandfather Clement Pryce-Fitton and Katrina. Where will the complications end? Not even at the Acknowledgments, whose first line identifies a real-life mystery a good deal more lighthearted than the higher-stakes case Theo’s plunged into.
Colorful, bustling, and stuffed to the brim with endless complications and a throwaway killer.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-011620-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A novel hook introduces an otherwise standard cozy.
The risks mount as the oddball business venture Emma Westlake launched in A Plus One for Murder (2021) picks up steam.
It took a lot of guts, some ingenuity, and a little bit of prodding from her octogenarian pal, Dottie Adler, but it looks like A Friend for Hire, Emma’s service for folks who need someone to offer unconditional support in their hour of need, is going to be a decent earner after all. In addition to Dottie, who still pays Emma for having tea with her once a week, there are three other clients and a fourth in the works. But Kim Felder, Emma’s newest paying friend, comes with a lot of baggage. She’s sad and lonely because now that her kids are grown, she has no one who needs her. But she’s also really, really angry because her husband dumped her for his thin, blond secretary. Emma encourages Kim to vent her frustrations on paper, writing down all the things she’d like to do to her ex. Which might be good psychology but turns out to be terrible advice from a legal standpoint, since once someone actually does strangle that old cheat Roger, the list provides Deputy Jack Riordan ample evidence to arrest Kim. Now Emma has two problems: First, her client is in the hoosegow, and second, she’s fighting with Jack just as their relationship is moving from the “friends” to the “dating” column. There’s only one way to fix this mess, and it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who has to crack this case.
A novel hook introduces an otherwise standard cozy.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59333-478-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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