An exciting, snowy murder mystery.
A private investigator takes on an insurance case and uncovers a conspiracy in Borg’s mystery novel.
In France, skier Colin Burns dies breaking a speed record (he “windmilled for 300 yards before his limp body, flailing like a rag doll, came to a stop”), but something about his death is suspicious. A few months later, in Tahoe, private investigator Owen McKenna finds an abandoned dog and gets a call from Geneviève Laurent, Colin’s girlfriend, who enlists his help with an issue related to Colin’s life insurance. Owen meets with her, and she provides him with a wealth of information about Colin’s life, friends, and family. Owen also questions Colin’s oversharing friends. He discovers that the abandoned dog, Lazlo, belonged to the chef at the Hungarian restaurant where Colin used to work; that chef, János, has gone missing. Owen pursues a copy of Colin’s autopsy report because he suspects foul play on the part of the insurance company—the autopsy indicates an unlikely injury. Then, Geneviève’s restaurant burns down—likely the result of arson—after she’d been harassed by a group of men extorting money from local restaurants. As Owen digs into both cases, he and his family find themselves in danger. The idea that gravity might not have been the culprit in Colin’s death should have been introduced sooner—there’s an inkling of that in the prologue, but it initially seems that Owen is doing a lot of investigative work that feels above and beyond due diligence for an insurance claim. This is an ongoing series, so readers get a peek at Owen’s personal life through his endearing relationships with his long-term girlfriend, Street, and her adopted daughter, Camille. Dog lovers will enjoy the near-constant presence of several pooches. The novel contains some great action and suspense sequences, and the main characters are fully fleshed out and feel authentic. Borg also offers a lot of engaging local details about Tahoe. Overall, this series installment works just fine as a standalone mystery, and it’s a fun read.
An exciting, snowy murder mystery.Pub Date: July 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781931296335
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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