Cape Cod provides an appealing backdrop for a food-centric cozy replete with red herrings and likable sleuths.
Virtuoso pastry chef Lily Roberts, no mean detective, takes on another case of murder.
Lily never wanted to enter a made-for-TV cooking contest, but she has no choice when Bernadette Murphy, her best friend, and Rose Campbell, her maternal grandmother—who owns the Victoria-on-Sea B&B whose grounds are graced by Lily’s shop, Tea by the Sea—enter her in the contest. On America Bakes! each episode takes place at a different bakery, and one will be proclaimed the winner at the end of the season. Lily quickly learns that America Bakes! is nowhere near as civilized as The Great British Baking Show when director Josh Henshaw and his assistant, Reilly Miller, arrive at Tea by the Sea and deliberately begin to stir up tensions. Lily’s helpers, Cheryl and her daughter, Marybeth, will be serving the food; the judges are New York City baker Claudia D’Angelo, bad-tempered English chef Tommy Greene, and Scarlet McIntosh, who’s just a pretty face. Although Josh drives Lily crazy with his demands, they manage to get through the first day with nothing worse than an uncomfortable visit from Lily’s competitor, Allegra Griffin, the unpleasant owner of the North Augusta Bakery. The second day is a different story. Marybeth trips and dumps tea in Tommy’s lap, causing a scene that’s just what the showrunners want, especially when Cheryl berates Tommy, saying she saw him trip Marybeth on purpose. When Tommy is found dead in Lily’s kitchen, his head bashed with her marble rolling pin, Cheryl is an obvious suspect. Lily, Bernie, and Rose use gossip, deep-dive computer searches, and observations of the bickering crew to unmask the killer.
Cape Cod provides an appealing backdrop for a food-centric cozy replete with red herrings and likable sleuths.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-49673-769-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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