A mystery debut that emphasizes grief and community, to soul-nourishing effect.
In Saul’s novel, the water rescue of a battered widow spurs the formation of a group of women who help people in need.
Four months ago, Beth Winstead lost her husband, Jamie, whom she was caring for after a five-year battle with early-onset dementia. Ever since, she’s tried to find peace at California’s Sausalito Rowing Club, where she’s befriended Charlie, her octogenarian rowing teacher, and Anneke, a strapping woman in her mid-50s who works as the club manager. Rowing out one day, Beth notices a blood-stained boat and a disoriented swimmer, and her former-FBI-agent instincts activate. She saves a Cuban woman named Elena Maria Benitez, discovering that she was drugged, kidnapped, and raped by a man named Jack Lewinski, who claims to be “untouchable” and above the law. Beth immediately takes Elena in, and as her friends rally around her, she begins to wonder if helping others could imbue her life with newfound purpose. (“Beth looked around the table at the eager, smiling faces. Kindness, curiosity, and humor showed in each one. What a gift they were turning out to be.”) Saul evokes the Bay Area setting and rowing culture in careful detail, but the dialogue can sometimes feel prosaic. The resolution feels rushed, but the book’s strength is not its mystery plot—it’s the spotlight the author shines on a community of strong women who persevere after their partners’ deaths and rediscover their identities beyond their roles as wives and mothers by creating change in their community. The women provide critical support while the narrative effectively explores the grief and other difficulties that come with being widowed and touches on issues including ageism and the struggles of motherhood. The result is a mystery grounded firmly in the mundane and a narrative that will resonate with many—older women readers, especially.
A mystery debut that emphasizes grief and community, to soul-nourishing effect.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9798897409624
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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