A baker turns sleuth to solve a murder with overabundant clues.
Ivy Culpepper (The Walking Bread, 2018, etc.) is bummed when her best friend Emmaline Davis’ beachside marriage proposal to Ivy’s brother, Billy, is interrupted by the discovery of the body of Marisol Ruiz floating near the shore. But Ivy’s pique goes nuclear when Sheriff Emmaline reveals that Marisol had been strangled before being dumped in the water. Marisol had been a fixture at Baptista’s Cantina and Grill, where she was not only a beloved longtime employee, but the mother of Sergio Morales, the husband of Miguel Baptista’s sister, Laura. Miguel not only owns Baptista’s, but has a long-term lease on Ivy’s heart: The two were high school sweethearts before Ivy temporarily lost her mind, moved to Austin, and married no-good Luke Holden. Now divorced from Luke and working at Yeast of Eden, an artisanal bakery in her hometown of Santa Sofia, Ivy wants Miguel back. What better way to return to her man’s good graces than to find the lowdown dog who killed his sister’s mother-in-law? Unfortunately, the path to the killer is cluttered. Marisol had been acting strangely since the recent death of her own father, turning away from her second husband, David, and writing urgent messages to her ex-husband, Johnny Morales. She quarreled with some of her children and changed her will. But nobody could have anticipated the depravity Ivy uncovers when she learns of the nasty secret at the heart of Marisol’s murder.
Wheels within wheels power a dark-inflected cozy.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2439-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | COZY MYSTERY | ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Murder and mayhem plague a film set on a secluded island off the coast of Delaware in Little’s (Dear Daughter, 2015, etc.) sophomore thriller.
When film editor Marissa Dahl takes a job on a new film directed by the talented but temperamental Tony Rees, she’s not given a script and must sign a mile-long nondisclosure agreement. It’s not ideal, but she needs the work. Escorted by an attractive ex–Navy SEAL named Isaiah, Marissa arrives on Kickout Island to find a bustling set, headquartered at a beautiful hotel, that is cloaked in secrecy and beset with dysfunction. Once Marissa gets down to work, she realizes that picking up the slack from the previous editor, who was fired for unknown reasons, won’t be smooth sailing and that the movie is based on the real-life unsolved murder of aspiring actress Caitlyn Kelly 25 years ago on that very island. Most folks assume that an eccentric ferry captain named Billy Lyle, a friend of Caitlyn’s, was the killer, but there was never enough evidence to convict. A few people, however, think he may be innocent. Marissa sets out to discover what really happened to Caitlyn with the help of Isaiah and two intrepid, tech-savvy 13-year-olds—Grace Portillo and Suzy Koh, whose parents work for the hotel. What she finds is a dead body and a whole lot of trouble. Readers fascinated with the behind-the-scenes machinations of a movie set will be enthralled, plus there’s a frisson of romantic tension between Isaiah and Marissa, and the island setting lends some spooky atmosphere. Snippets from Grace and Suzy’s true-crime podcast, Dead Ringer, are also sprinkled throughout. Though a killer on the loose adds a fair bit of urgency in the second half, the main focus is on Little’s singular narrator. Marissa relates to the world primarily through film and considers herself anything but typical: “It’s possible I’ve spent so much time watching movies that the language of film has infiltrated some primal, necessary part of my brain. I catch myself processing my own emotions in scenes, in shots, in dialogue.”
A quirky and distinctive heroine headlines this fun and fast-paced thriller loaded with cinematic flourishes.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-670-01639-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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