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
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
