A lovely valentine to Mead’s idol, John Dickson Carr, and even more to Clayton Rawson’s tales of The Great Merlini.
A pair of threatened deaths explode into a mind-bogglingly complex series of murders in this impossible-crime saga appropriately set in the run-up to Christmas 1938.
Victor Silvius has been confined to The Grange, the private sanatorium run by Dr. Jasper Moncrieff, ever since he attacked Justice Sir Giles Drury with a knife nine years ago because he was convinced the judge had poisoned Gloria Crain, the law clerk Victor loved. But his sister, Caroline, tells Inspector George Flint that neither the attack nor Victor’s diagnosis of mental illness warrants his death at the hands of an anonymous correspondent who’s been threatening him. Even as Caroline is making her plea, the judge’s wife, Lady Elspeth Drury, dispatches Jeffrey Flack, her son by her first marriage, to Flint’s sometime collaborator, professional illusionist Joseph Spector, asking him to meet with her so she can urge him to save her husband from the death threats he’s received from none other than Victor Silvius. The corpse discovered soon afterward, stabbed to death in the middle of a frozen lake, isn’t that of Drury or Victor, but once the floodgates have opened—there’ll be a total of five more victims, some of them killed in remarkably ingenious ways—there’s no guarantee that either of them will survive. Working once more with Flint, Spector traces the clues to the killer, solves the mystery, and then does it again and again, incorporating new twists and new depths each time. To bolster his Golden Age credentials, Mead supplies a dramatis personae, a family tree, two floor plans, a challenge to the reader, and dozens of footnotes referencing earlier clues that even the most alert readers will have missed.
A lovely valentine to Mead’s idol, John Dickson Carr, and even more to Clayton Rawson’s tales of The Great Merlini.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781613165300
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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