A familiar tale of the good fighting off evil that holds few surprises.
The owner of a domestic agency finds her own domestic bliss shattered when her husband agrees to paint the portrait of an aging screen star.
Bea Abbot found so much to like in her first husband, Piers, that after the death of her second, she was willing to give the reformed philanderer another chance. Now Bea and Piers, a busy portrait painter, live together comfortably in a multistory, multipurpose home. Her agency occupies the spacious lower level, she and Piers live in the middle, and the upper story is available to Bea’s ward, Bernice, when she isn’t away at boarding school. Piers uses the cottage in the mews behind the house, where he lived before the remarriage, as his art studio. It’s lucky that it’s available, since Karina, subject of his latest portrait, has chucked him out of her house in Belgravia, claiming he stole a valuable piece of her jewelry while preserving her image for posterity. Piers isn’t the first target of Karina’s wrath. The actress, widely considered a “national treasure,” fired her cook the day before and more recently accused her ghostwriter, Molly Malone, of theft. When Molly, intent on salvaging her reputation, flees to Bea’s house, Bea realizes to her consternation not only that Abbot Agency had sent Molly—who had no experience as a writer—to help Karina write her memoir, but that Molly had listed Piers’ studio as her mailing address. Alarm turns to terror when Molly’s friend Jolene, another Abbot Agency employee, disappears, and Karina’s adult sons break into Bea’s home looking for the thumb drive containing Molly’s version of the memoir. Layers of deceit push Bea to the brink as she fights a family with absolutely no scruples.
A familiar tale of the good fighting off evil that holds few surprises.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-5057-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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