Scots lore, a bit of humor, and plenty of suspects make for a lively mystery.
A young woman’s business is in better shape than her private life.
In addition to dealing with her moody teen son, Brody, and her stubborn granddad, Paislee Shaw finds her shop, Cashmere Crush, busy with the summer influx of tourists to Nairn, in the Scottish Highlands. As a volunteer for the upcoming Highland Games, she’s lucky to have part-time help: Her newest hire, Rhona Smythe, is working to repay her parents for the speeding tickets she’s amassed. Rhona’s into Highland Dance, and her boyfriend, Artie Whittle, is involved in several events, including the caber toss, which involves throwing a tapered log of about 16 feet long. At the games, all kinds of last-minute problems arise, including rumors of steroid use. When someone gives Artie a bit of slippery oil instead of resin for his hands, his toss ends in disaster and his caber splits. Artie’s older brother was on his way to becoming a professional strongman before he died in a car accident, and their father is a rage-filled taskmaster who constantly puts Artie down. A couple of days later, Paislee takes Rhona to Artie’s house when he fails to answer repeated phone calls, and they find him unconscious on the lawn, covered in the blood of his father, who’s dead in the kitchen. Artie is naturally a suspect, but he has plenty of competition, for Joseph was not only a bad father but also a serial cheater and a seller of steroids. DI Mack Zeffer, who’s met Paislee on other murder cases, listens attentively when she says that Artie’s innocent. Although Paislee’s in love with the handsome, wealthy detective, she refuses to become involved until Brody turns 18. Unexpected revelations long before then break the case and change her life.
Scots lore, a bit of humor, and plenty of suspects make for a lively mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781496754677
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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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