A puzzling mystery laced with guile and humor.
A faux witch must deal with a putative werewolf.
Since helping the wealthy Hartford family rid their ancient English estate of ghosts and solving a murder (Séances Are for Suckers, 2018), Ellie Wilde has set up shop as an elixir seller and spellcaster in the nearby village. Now that she no longer has to help her sister, who’s passed on but still talks to her, Ellie ekes out a living selling potions whose main ingredient is vodka and refusing the help offered by Nicholas Harford III, whose romantic appeal is one more reason for staying in England. Although her profession makes her efforts to deal herself into village life something of a tough sell, she’s made several friends, including Nicholas’ niece, Rachel; his rather odd mother, Vivian; and Annis, the vicar whose influence keeps Ellie from being totally shunned. When cordially disliked Sarah Blackthorne keels over and dies at a planning meeting for the village fete, Ellie has every reason to be drawn into Inspector Piper’s investigation, since the choice of wolfsbane as the weapon points to her. The discovery of a pig she’d put a spell on that’s ripped to pieces and the disappearance of her own cat make her deeply disturbed but more determined than ever to get to the bottom of it all. She gets help from Rachel and Lenora, the village doctor’s stepdaughter, who’s shadowing Ellie for a school project. One of Lenora’s activities is researching werewolves, and her discoveries make even the deeply skeptical Ellie wonder whether they may actually exist. The case is further complicated when the inspector’s aunt reports that someone’s stolen some wolfsbane from a locked cage in her garden. Although she has no magic powers, Ellie’s very good at reading people, and her skills put her in danger before she comes to a decidedly mundane solution.
A puzzling mystery laced with guile and humor.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1963-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.
Spenser goes to Hollywood.
In the two years since she’s moved from Cambridge to Los Angeles in pursuit of stardom, Gabrielle Leggett has been a dog walker, a personal assistant, a model, an actress, a media influencer, and now, for the past two weeks, a missing person. The LAPD knows about Gabby’s disappearance, but her mother, dissatisfied with their efforts, sends Spenser (Robert B. Parker’s Old Black Magic, 2018, etc.) out to the Left Coast to do the job right. Predictably, Gabby’s agent and former romantic partner, Eric Collinson, doesn’t want to talk to him. Neither does Jeffrey Bloom, the acting coach who thought Gabby had just dropped out of his class, or Jimmy Yamashiro, the married studio CEO who took Collinson’s place. And the only thing publicist Nancy Sharp, Gabby’s ex-boss, wants to talk about is how much fun she and Spenser could have if he’d only lighten up. Eventually Spenser works his contacts to get an audience with Yamashiro, but the results are less than impressive. He must be making an impression, though, because five Armenian thugs ambush him and shoot his West Coast associate, Zebulun Sixkill, in the arm, disabling him and requiring Spenser to look for another sidekick. Eventually he gets a lead that connects Gabby to Joseph Haldorn, aka Phaethon, the founder of HELIOS, a hush-hush organization that promises self-actualization and conducts itself suspiciously like a cult. But instead of thickening, the mystery surrounding Gabby just gets more violent and diffuse. Surprisingly, Atkins gets the hardest parts right—his hero/narrator now sounds indistinguishable from Robert B. Parker’s—but bogs down in the plotting, the area in which he presumably had the freest hand. As for the cod-out-of-water milieu, it evokes not so much particular SoCal locations as dozens of earlier SoCal whodunits.
Readers who’ve always wanted to see Spenser in Tinseltown can cross that off their bucket lists.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53682-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.
A fatal accident that tangles the fates of three ill-assorted people when two cars crash into each other outside a Gloucester village raises urgent questions about the living.
Hours after being ejected from the Lamb, Viv Holland’s pub in Lower Slaughter, her former boss Fergus O’Reilly, who’s turned up without warning and pressed her to take a new job 12 years after she quit his Michelin-rated Chelsea restaurant, is found dead after a collision outside the village. Nor is he the only victim: Nell Greene, the Lamb patron who’d picked up Fergus when she saw him walking uncertainly along the road to drive him to the hospital, has also died at the scene. And there’s evidence that Fergus was fatally poisoned even before the crash. The Met’s Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, DI Gemma James, are on hand to investigate because they’ve accepted an invitation to stay at Beck House, the home of DS Melody Talbot’s wealthy parents, Sir Ivan and Lady Adelaide Talbot, for whom Viv has agreed to cater an elaborate charity luncheon. But Kincaid, who was driving the car Nell struck and survived the collision only to see Nell die as he looked on helplessly, isn’t himself either physically or mentally, and the solution seems a long way off. There’ll be another murder, a series of increasingly revealing flashbacks to Viv’s stint at O’Reilly’s 12 years ago, and endless updates on the sexual histories of the suspects with the victims, each other, and the police. Through it all, Kincaid and Gemma (Garden of Lamentations, 2017, etc.) keep stiff upper lips even when the dark revelations reach into Beck House.
Leisurely, conscientiously plotted, smoothly written, and more surprising in its details than its larger arc.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-227166-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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