A welcome further adventure by an audacious, attractive investigator.
To catch the killer of a database administrator at a Baltimore company, a tech-savvy private investigator goes undercover as the dead man’s replacement.
When Jason Napier turns up dead, his wife, Amy, hires private investigator C.T. Ferguson to poke around. “The coroner told me he froze to death,” Amy tells C.T. in Fowler’s 11th crime novel about the PI. “It doesn’t make any sense.” She adds that her husband told her he thought co-workers might be “double dipping,” which C.T. presumes “didn’t mean with the chips and salsa.” Jason had worked at Research and Technology Partners, an outfit that had helped companies in pretty dire straits have a brief resurgence known as a “dead cat bounce.” RTP operates out of a former meatpacking plant that has a freezer in the basement. Devon Knott, company CEO, backs Amy’s suspicions, and hires C.T. to pose as Jason’s replacement in order to infiltrate the company. Louie Eckert, head of mergers and acquisitions, and his “two meathead subordinates” quickly tangle with the private eye. Also on the detective’s case are goons hired by Gabriella Rizzo, whose father had dealings with C.T. in an earlier novel in the series. And the PI’s affluent parents—especially his mother, who only calls him by his given name, Coningsby—worry that his job is too dangerous after he was shot during an earlier misadventure. But the many perks of being C.T. include his wealthy girlfriend, Gloria, and his physical attractiveness. Although his undercover appearance includes a platinum wig and colored contact lenses, Gloria notes, “You can’t hide handsome.” Some readers may be put off by C.T.’s snarkiness, macho attributes, and unconventional tactics. Others may wonder why the police closed the case on Jason Napier’s death so early (and so conveniently for the plot). But the novel has an appealingly quick pace, and people familiar with Baltimore will enjoy the many references to the city’s sites.
A welcome further adventure by an audacious, attractive investigator.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953603-41-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Widening Gyre Media
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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