Nothing that follows lives up to Thomas’ extravagant premise, but then nothing could.
A pair of Victorian enquiry agents take on an apparently routine assignment for an unlikely quartet of clients that leads to some truly weird complications.
The Civil War may have ended nearly 30 years ago, but that doesn’t deter four officers from the Confederate army—General James Woodson, Brigadier David St. Ives, Colonel Zebedee Beaufort, and Captain Manuel Cortes—from leaving the far-flung places in Latin America where they’ve been soldiering on to gather in London, where they ask Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn to wangle them an audience with Lord Rosebery, the prime minister. Granted 15 minutes on the PM’s schedule, they waste no time in demanding that England fulfill an 1865 treaty that promised to deliver the Confederacy an ironclad warship. Things can’t possibly go well for the Crown whether it grants or denies the request, since the nation will either be breaking faith with its most hallowed diplomatic practices or ratifying the Confederacy as a going concern in 1894. Though Barker and Llewelyn have already served their primary function, they can’t ignore the genie they’ve helped escape from the bottle, and in short order they accompany St. Ives, a notorious sensualist, to some of London’s most tawdry fleshpots, dig up information they hope can impugn all four of the envoys-come-lately, and follow up hints that link the treaty to both the recent murder of former U.S. senator turned Confederate diplomat Jubal Slidell, the last survivor of the real-life seizure of two Confederate officers from HMS Trent during the war, and two wildly unlikely historical figures who are supposed to have died long ago.
Nothing that follows lives up to Thomas’ extravagant premise, but then nothing could.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781250864925
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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