The detection is nominal, and the mystery takes a back seat to the comic bedlam that reigns throughout. But readers who have...
This first novel from Australian science writer Flannery (Atmosphere of Hope, 2015, etc.) travels back in time to 1932-1933—and back in cultural mores a lot further—when intrigue swirls around an aboriginal mask enshrined in the Sydney Museum.
“Enshrined” may not be quite the right word. Anthropologist Archibald Meek, returning from five years embedded with the natives of Venus Island, is horrified to discover the gigantic mask, ringed with 32 human skulls, prominently displayed in the museum’s boardroom. To be fair, Dr. Vere Griffon, the museum’s director, is equally unhappy that Archie overstayed his Venus Island posting by two years and fears he may have gone native—a fear shared in her own way by virginal archaeology registrar Beatrice Goodenough, who, swept off her feet by Archie’s posted marriage proposal, was seriously jolted by the personal gift that followed it. While he’s trying to mend fences with Beatrice, Archie can’t help noticing that four of the skulls surrounding the fetish are a different color than the others and that the buck-toothed mouth of one of them reminds Archie very much of Cecil Polkinghorne, his mentor, the latest of four museum employees to have vanished without a trace. Could someone be removing the original skulls, memorials of an 1892 shipwreck, and replacing them with more recently harvested products? Archie has precious little energy to devote to serious detective work when he must spend his days negotiating a cast of colleagues, board members, and government overseers straight out of P.G. Wodehouse and renegotiating his relationship with his ladylove. But the truth is bound to out, one way or another.
The detection is nominal, and the mystery takes a back seat to the comic bedlam that reigns throughout. But readers who have never before encountered sentences like “He knew he must get his foreskin back” will cheer Archie’s debut and hope for more.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07942-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
A budding romance and an age-old motive combine in a heartwarming cozy.
A small-town businesswoman’s sleuthing marks her for death.
Winona Mae Montgomery saved her Granny Smythe’s apple orchard from ruin by building a thriving cider and event business in Blossom Valley, West Virginia. She’s receiving praise, and a hefty check, for throwing together a fabulous wedding reception for Elsie Sawyer and Jack Warren when the party's happy mood turns sour. The bride seems angry, the groom tipsy, and Winnie’s heartbreaking ex-boyfriend Hank Donovan’s interested in making out with a bridesmaid. But these minor glitches pale when the groom is found dead under the truck with "Just Married" on the window after having had words with Hank. Winnie developed a relationship with Sheriff Colton Wise in her last brush with murder (Apple Cider Slaying, 2019). Although he’s willing to listen to her ideas, he warns her off the case, a warning she ignores since Hank is a prime suspect. The best man, Aaron, had the key to the truck, but even after it turns up in the visor, Winnie keeps him on her list of suspects, along with the bride and the bridesmaid, who’s made herself scarce. After Hank’s sister, Gina, begs Winnie for help, they discover a bunch of flirty emails from Sarah Bear Twenty-two, who turns out to be the elusive bridesmaid. When Colton tells Winnie that mud found in her house contains mushrooms, she realizes that it may have been left by Hank, who has an old cabin in the woods, and she enlists her best friend, park ranger Dot, to help her find it. Soon after they find camping gear inside the cabin that Hank probably took from Winnie’s house, someone starts shooting at them, and they must run for their lives. Winnie realizes that she must find out a lot more about the bride and groom before she can possibly understand who murdered Jack and is willing to kill again to keep a secret.
A budding romance and an age-old motive combine in a heartwarming cozy.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2349-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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