A brief but thrilling whodunit that doesn’t disappoint.
In Smith’s mystery novella, a Chicago detective must find the person behind three grisly murders before they strike again.
Det. Sammy Stone has seen the evils of humanity firsthand, but this case may be the most troubling he’s ever encountered. In three months, three women have been found dead, all of them bound and gagged, stabbed, and scalped: Abigail May in September, Barbara Tony in October, and now, in November, 21-year-old clothing salesperson Marci Levelle. They’re all attractive women with long, brown hair but seem to have little else in common. Sammy, along with his partner, Det. Will Getz, must comb through their lives to try and find the monster responsible. In all three cases, it appears the victims trusted their killer enough to invite them inside their homes without a fight. Lately, Sammy hasn’t been sleeping well; in his personal life, he’s had a series of failed relationships and is hoping his most recent one, with the mysterious Eve Blue, won’t follow that pattern. On a date, after Eve has told Sammy about herself, he accuses her of lying about her background. Soon afterward, Eve’s younger sister, Susan, seems to confirm that Eve “isn’t who she pretends to be.” Sammy, upset with another potential romantic failure, throws himself into his work; as he digs into Marci’s background, a revelation shocks and horrifies him. Over the course of this novella, Smith has crafted a careful and detailed mystery that’s full of intensity and excitement, and its setup pays off with a surprising ending. Readers may wish that the killer’s motivation were better described and rationalized, but most of the other characters feel realistic and believable. Sammy is depicted as a classic, familiar, and worn-down detective who’s seen too many terrible things and desperately needs to take a rest but whose mission still drives him forward. Overall, it’s a fine mystery with twists that will keep the reader guessing.
A brief but thrilling whodunit that doesn’t disappoint.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781667895239
Page Count: 64
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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