Pearl survives its debut, but Leigh needs better expository strategies if she’s planning a follow-up.
Murder threatens the opening weekend at an upstate New York bed and breakfast.
Jess Byrne and her business partner, Kat Miller, have every reason to be optimistic about the future of Pearl, their pink-themed B&B in Fletcher Lake. Ever since they were featured in the New York Times’ list of up-and-coming Hudson Valley hot spots, they’ve been booked solid for the entire season. But disaster strikes quickly. On their second morning, Jess’ sister-in-law finds a body in the lake, threatening the chill vibe that had been building from the inn’s free-flowing rosé and a successful set from guitarist George Havers, a last-minute replacement for Jess’ ex-boyfriend Lars Armstrong. Lars’ now-late manager, Bob Strapp, was so universally despised that Jess can think of nearly a dozen suspects. There are so many characters, in fact, that Leigh sometimes seems to lose track of what they’re up to. Some of them comment on events they’ve never been told about, as when Kat taunts Lars about his financial woes, which he’s revealed only to Jess. Jess decides that her mother’s aid will be pivotal to solving Bob’s murder, then drops Mom for a dozen chapters. Leigh can forget what she’s written earlier in the very same scene. When Jess and Detective James Holloway interview Havers in his room, the musician is “using a towel to shield his lower half.” A page later, he sweeps up his paramour in his arms and carries her to the bed, still in front of Jess and James. What happened to that towel? After interviewing a suspect, Jess sits in her van and confesses herself “now more confused than ever.” She’s not the only one.
Pearl survives its debut, but Leigh needs better expository strategies if she’s planning a follow-up.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781639106394
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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