A gripping crime yarn from one of the best.
Third in a series—after A Thin Dark Line (1997) and The Boy (2018)—featuring a pair of married detectives in Louisiana.
A body lies on the bank of a bayou, his face and hands obliterated by a shotgun blast. He has no ID. Why, police wonder, didn’t the killer use any of the countless places one might dump the body forever in the alligator-infested swamps of the south Louisiana French Triangle? Then at the local sheriff’s office, B’Lynn Fontenot makes a frantic scene because no one will look for her missing adult son. But Det. Antoinette “Annie” Broussard listens with compassion and promises to investigate the young man’s fate, for better or worse. Is he the homicide victim? DNA testing will take time. Meanwhile, Annie muses that “B’Lynn could hold onto a sliver of hope, and the thing about slivers was that they were usually painful and often left a scar.” Then a second man is reported missing, and the Partout Parish sheriff’s office gets busy. A former high school football star had become hooked on painkillers years earlier after a 350-pound kid landed on him during practice. Was it an accident? That’s part of the gripping plot that opens a window into Cajun culture. Lt. Nick Fourcade leads a division of several detectives that includes Annie, who’s his wife. She’s just returned to work after having been badly hurt on the job, and he’d like her to take it easy. But “when trouble comes calling, you are seldom out of earshot,” he says. Nick and Annie are a well-matched pair both professionally and maritally, and they are decent, loyal, and tough. Spousal abuse, drug addiction, jealousy, and revenge cloud the lives of victims and suspects alike while characters like Nick pepper their dialogue with a Cajun patois: a fool is a couillon, a runt is a pischouette. Nick is far more endearing to Annie, whom he privately calls ‘Toinette. Hoag is a terrific crime writer, but readers have had to wait long stretches to catch up with Nick and Annie: It’s been six years since book no. 2 and it was 21 years before that. Maybe Hoag will lessen the gap next time. Anyway, the ending just might make a reader’s eyes well up. C’est vrai.
A gripping crime yarn from one of the best.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781101985434
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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