A lively and atmospheric occult mystery with a main character who’s as hellish as she is human.
A half-demon private investigator takes on her strangest case yet in Sfetsos’ fast-paced, witty, and darkly charming urban fantasy.
Destiny Sagar, a “Private Investigator of the Weird Kind,” is accustomed to tracking cursed artifacts, shapeshifters who’ve gone missing, and the occasional hexed heirloom. But when a mysterious caller says, “I need you to find me an angel,” her professional detachment falters. That request sets off a chain of encounters that test both her control over her demonic powers and her faith in the human world she’s tried to make her home. The story unfolds in a well-rendered mix of noir grit and occult mystery. Sfetsos’ world is full of witches, selkies, and other beings hiding behind magical glamours. Early scenes establish Destiny’s duality—her horns, tail, and cloven hooves concealed by jeans and sarcasm—as she battles both inner rage and outer danger. A nun named Sister Trinity appears, and her calm conceals a darker truth; Destiny’s immediate reaction—“A nun didn’t shed ash for no reason”—signals that nothing in this world is as it seems. The uneasy partnership between the half-demon and the possibly fallen holy woman drives the bulk of the story, which thrives on tension between faith and corruption, morality and instinct. Sfetsos keeps readers off-balance with flickers of religious horror, sharp banter, and moments of genuine pathos as Destiny wonders whether she can still claim a soul. The supporting cast is well-drawn: Zenda, Destiny’s mentor and surrogate mother, grounds the narrative with warmth and wit, while Kenan, her erudite partner, provides a gentler counterpoint. The author uses their dynamic to add a romantic undercurrent that never overwhelms the plot but gives it emotional heft. As the novel moves toward its conclusion, Destiny confronts her origins and the blurred line between heaven and hell. The story’s spiritual undercurrents bloom in its haunting final act, where an angel’s quiet greeting—“It’s nice to finally meet you, Horned Lady”—becomes an unexpected exchange of grace. “The way to Hell is paved with souls,” Destiny reflects, closing a tale that merges noir fatalism with hope.
A lively and atmospheric occult mystery with a main character who’s as hellish as she is human.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781963355390
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Brigids Gate Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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