A wonderfully hectic antidote for readers who think English village mysteries are too sedate.
Murder most foul is the least of the problems shaking up the household of Sir Julian Marston-Lang.
When his stepcousin, Celine, finds her sister, Mona, dead in the garden of Oak Lodge, Julian naturally calls Bea Abbot, whose business running an employment agency has a long history of being upstaged by criminal investigations, to come out from London to help. And no wonder, since the Axton constabulary are practically invisible and Julian can’t take a leading role: his household is beset by more pressing issues. Now that Oak Lodge is a crime scene, Celine and her brother-in-law, Marcus, who married Mona while he was still a billionaire, have to find somewhere else to lodge. But Marcus has disappeared, and house-rich, cash-poor Julian can’t possibly put up Celine in the manse he’s slowly rehabbing, since there’s barely enough livable space for his wife, Polly, and their two children. In addition, Julian has to deal with the armed thieves who’ve been stealing the healing waters on his property, marketing them as Marston Spring Water. The thieves will stop at nothing: One runs Polly’s car off the road, and another dumps a lorry full of manure at Julian’s gate. Not to be outdone, Polly’s poisonous father, Mr. Colston, who’s never approved of her daughter’s marriage to a changeling and former charity student of his, storms into church and interrupts the service by denouncing her and her family at the top of his lungs. Even though there are surprisingly few suspects for Mona’s murder, the relatively straightforward whodunit will have to wait its turn in a long queue.
A wonderfully hectic antidote for readers who think English village mysteries are too sedate.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781448317707
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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