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
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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