A straightforward whodunit that gets a welcome boost from its multilayered characterization.
An environmentalist writer teams up with a military friend and a private eye to reexamine a cold missing-persons case in Buhr’s mystery novel.
In the mid-2000s, middle-aged Floridian Arthur Jenkins loses Paula, his beloved wife of 10 years whom he’s known since they were tweens. After the recovering alcoholic goes on a bender, he checks himself into a detox program and then takes refuge in his home state of Michigan. There, Arthur, a magazine editor and writer who wrote a Florida-centric book on environmentalism, reconnects with his old pal, a lawyer and former U.S. Army colonel named Eddie Fletcher. Eddie invites Arthur to go fly fishing in Northern Michigan, but what Eddie truly wants is his friend’s help in investigating a cold case. A couple of decades ago, in 1984, Michigan college students Donny Massengale and Roland Parrish inexplicably vanished during a fishing trip. No sign of the two, or the red Blazer they were driving, has been found since. Eddie also brings in private investigator Zac Phoenix, who, like Eddie, has spent years working in military intelligence. They first investigate circles of stones and tracings in the dirt near where the young men vanished, as well as the equally bizarre werewolf-themed parties that took place in the area in the year or two before the disappearance. They also uncover a suspicious death that occurred around the same time that the story of the missing students broke. Before long, the trio of investigators has a handful of people to interview and a few suspects as they try to solve what’s very likely a double homicide.
The first part of Buhr’s novel offers a compelling portrayal of a man suffering a tragic loss. Many readers will relate to Arthur as he plans his late wife’s funeral while also dealing with high-maintenance in-laws. Even as the mystery takes center stage, frequent reminders of Arthur’s residual pain crop up, as when he laments such simple things as hearing Paula’s voice. Arthur, Eddie, and Zac’s pursuit of the missing-persons case is less engaging, but it’s an effective display of their dedication. Arthur, for example, painstakingly combs through microfilm of decades-old newspapers, while Zac is skilled at procuring protected information. Arthur also intriguingly questions his role in the investigation, as he’s a writer who doesn’t possess any of the impressive abilities that his military-trained comrades do. What the trio ultimately unearths pushes the story into very dark territory, and some of what they discuss is graphic. However, Buhr never lingers on the violent content, although these details are necessary to reach the truth. Arthur, who narrates, proves to be the most enjoyable character, but Eddie comes close to stealing the novel. He’s bright and compassionate, but also loud and brazen; his recent interview on TV, which he gave in Baghdad’s Green Zone, even landed him in hot water. His bluntness often results in some of the book’s best lines: “Just what kind of a bear are we poking here?”
A straightforward whodunit that gets a welcome boost from its multilayered characterization.Pub Date: March 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781958363645
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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