The most confounding, mystifying, mind-boggling 24 hours most readers will ever encounter in fiction or real life.
On the eve of World War II, a motley crew intent on reconnecting with the past motors out to a former hospital for servicemen from the Great War, where two impossible crimes will abruptly diminish their numbers.
After surviving enough wartime calamities to have killed most soldiers, Maurice Bailey, blind and mute, finally succumbed to his unspeakable injuries a year after the war ended. The last day of August 1939 finds his mother, Virginia Bailey, riding with spiritualist Madame Adaline La Motte and her companion, reporter Imogen Drabble, to the eponymous house where her beloved son breathed his last in the hope of summoning his spirit. Professional magician Joseph Spector has a different agenda: resolving the mystery surrounding the Aitken Inheritance, which passed from Dominic Edgecomb to his brother, Rodney, when Dominic went down with the Titanic, only to return miraculously a year later in a futile bid to reclaim his legacy from Rodney, who insists that the claimant was an imposter. As the travelers, whose numbers also include psychic investigator Francis Tulp and Det. Walter Judd, approach their destination, Scotland Yard Inspector George Flint and Sgt. Jerome Hook discover the body of Rodney Edgecomb dead in a room they’ve had under uninterrupted surveillance. Is it really the suicide it seems to be? And who will become the next victim? Mead piles on enough complications, red herrings, misdirections, impersonations, and period details, from rumors of wartime trysts and betrayals to The Stepney Lad, a dummy Maurice fashioned by hand, to fill a whole shelf of Golden Age puzzlers.
The most confounding, mystifying, mind-boggling 24 hours most readers will ever encounter in fiction or real life.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166505
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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