A lively combination of mystery, romance, and gemology that will appeal to fans of Jane K. Cleland and Paige Shelton.
A fabulous gemstone is a magnet for murder.
In a rousing series debut, Gardner introduces 25-year-old Avery Ayers and her sister, Tilly, a high school senior, who are still recovering from the deaths of their parents in a car accident almost a year ago. While their Aunt Midge is sharing their suburban New York home, they also use her apartment in Manhattan, where Avery has taken her parents’ place at their art and antiques appraisal business. When a note in their father’s handwriting is slipped through their mail slot, they’re all deeply disturbed. The note says, "You must decline the contract. Your life is at stake." The note may refer to a job Avery is planning to start that day, authenticating a stone for the Museum of Antiquities. The stone, owned by a reclusive man who claims to have found it at a flea market in Munich, may be a priceless ruby or a much less expensive spinel—and it might even be a famously missing ruby from the museum's most important piece, the Emperor's Twins medallion. Avery discovers that her parents had worked on authenticating the remaining ruby eye in the Emperor’s Twins medallion just before their deaths and notices odd things such as the fact that the case of her parents’ deaths has not been closed by the police. Avery receives another mysterious note telling her to find someone named Art at the museum. Art Smith turns out to be a remarkably closemouthed police detective masquerading as one of the guards protecting the gem. After searching through the papers her parents stored at home, Avery is attacked and her aunt’s dog injured by a violent intruder. Now she can only trust her family and the attractive detective as they work to solve the puzzle of the ruby and discover who is willing to kill for it.
A lively combination of mystery, romance, and gemology that will appeal to fans of Jane K. Cleland and Paige Shelton.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64385-659-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.
Penny, who’s never met a story idea big enough to daunt her, unspools the endless puzzles surrounding a corpse whose identity isn’t known but whose status as a murder victim is clear.
“There’s a body in Lost Nation,” a dead-of-night telephone call informs Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the homicide division at the Sûreté du Québec. Why is the informant calling Gamache’s personal line, and how did they get his number? For that matter, who placed the call? It certainly wasn’t Clara Morrow, the Gamaches’ neighbor and friend, whose phone seems to have been used by someone who visited her home. And where is Lost Nation? This last question, at least, yields an answer: It’s an Indigenous burial ground that’s been overgrown with trees and, more recently, a corpse too badly decomposed to be readily identified. An autopsy reveals that the victim was beaten to death. In the absence of further clues to his identity, Gamache and his colleagues focus on May 29, 1914, the date engraved on the otherwise unreadable headstone over the gravesite where the body was found. The trail to the killer leads back to a 1967 interview genealogist Jeannette Bouchard conducted with local historian Flossy Fuller the day before they were both killed in a car crash, and still further back to the real-life sinking of the Empress of Ireland, an ocean liner as unfamiliar to Penny’s characters as it will be to most of her readers. Even after Gamache has arrested the responsible parties, the biggest riddle remains: the secret of the balefully ugly plant known as Miss Wolcott’s Ghost.
A superpowered mystery shrouded in mysticism and history whose power endures past its closing revelations.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781250412607
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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