A legal mystery layered with a ghost story boasts a propulsive plot and lively, engaging characters.
A lawyer returns to her childhood home after a crisis and stumbles into a shocking plot and family secrets.
Six months after Deena Wood’s beloved mother dies, her high-flying job at an Atlanta law firm and her troubled marriage simultaneously collapse, so she goes home to Brunswick, Georgia, to regroup. Deena, who narrates the novel, is still reeling, not just from grief but because her father, whom she adores, has quickly gotten remarried—to Ruth, one of her late mother’s friends. Deena takes some comfort being back in the Black community of her childhood and finds a make-do job as a legal consultant at a development firm in Brunswick. One day, hoping to clear her head, she takes a drive out to one of the coastal Golden Isles, where “the wealthy…built their winter retreats on the backs of Black laborers.” There she has a frightening encounter with an old Black man who fires a warning shot at her, then accuses her of being sent by some mysterious “they” to get him off his land. After Holcomb Gardner sends her away with a warning, she’s nearly run off the road by another car. Her father knows who Holcomb is but seems uncomfortable talking about him or his late sister, Delilah. The mystery deepens when Deena goes back to the island and finds no trace of Holcomb or the trailer he was living in. Instead, there’s a huge “For Sale” sign on the property. Deena plunges into the mystery, following a trail of connections in the community that will eventually uncover a scheme to exploit Black landowners via a legal quirk. It also uncovers murders, putting Deena and those she loves in danger. The ghost story woven into the plot tells a tale of old secrets that might not stay buried and restless spirits still trying to protect the living.
A legal mystery layered with a ghost story boasts a propulsive plot and lively, engaging characters.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063322219
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
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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
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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BOOK REVIEW
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