Since so much of the mystery-mongering arises from the backstory, this installment is probably best for fans of the series.
A radical Regency aristocrat is caught up in murder and lies within her own family.
Abigail Carrington Monroe, Lady Worthing, holds an unusual and precarious place as a baroness in 1807 London. As an Englishwoman with Black ancestry, she works tirelessly to persuade Parliament to abolish slavery. As a lover of puzzles, she’s solved three mysteries to date. And as a wife whose husband, a naval hero, has long been away, she’s formed a chaste but intense friendship with her neighbor, the inquisitive physician Stapleton Henderson—a relationship that Lord Worthing, returning from years on the high seas, has responded to with foul abuse. But none of these threats to Abigail’s standing can compare to her walk with Stapleton and their beloved dogs, which leads to the discovery of Worthing’s body, bashed in the head, stabbed in the eye, and dragged into St. James’s Park. Her failing marriage and the discovery of one of her gloves nearby make Abigail a suspect, although the implausibly rapid and scientifically advanced coroner’s report does exclude the fireplace pokers from their home as possible weapons. Bound by the etiquette of mourning, Abigail’s inquiries into Worthing’s past are limited to those who visit to pay their respects. Despite this constraint, they raise shocking questions about crimes she believed she’d already brought to justice. After she finally reads through her late husband’s many papers and letters, she calls her family and their most dedicated lieges to her parlor to reveal the true killer to the magistrate.
Since so much of the mystery-mongering arises from the backstory, this installment is probably best for fans of the series.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781448317646
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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