A thrilling and tense mystery with electrifying horror, featuring a detective with a heart of gold.
In Jones’ supernatural mystery, the second in a series, a detective touched by the occult investigates the disappearances of 49 women.
Jarek Videni, the intuitive detective, returns to solve an even more gruesome case. He’s in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1924; over the past 28 years, 49 women have gone missing in a town already brimming with an undercurrent of lawlessness. Deadwood once flourished as a mining town—the gold is long gone, but the tunnels and their secrets remain. Jarek arrives at the Terry Hotel and encounters ghosts desperately seeking to communicate with him as they predict another victim will soon be taken (“ ‘Shhhheee’s neeexxt,’ it said before taking a deep, raspy breath. ‘Shhee’ss neeexxt . . . and she knowsss it’ ”). Also staying at the hotel is Marcus Livingston, a federal agent determined to find answers and stop whatever is taking the women. Jarek was summoned to town via a telegram from his grandmother, Leona Videni, who urged him to keep a close eye on Ulrika Johnston, the maid at the hotel. She is a sweet young woman, the unknowing target of wicked people plotting against her—and against Jarek, as well. The nefarious group is led by a man who believes he can control demons, and Jarek will have to find a strength he didn’t know he had (and pick up some unexpected allies) if he hopes to defeat this evil. The author builds upon the foundation of the series’ previous installment (Chasing Shadows: Genesis, 2022) to develop his historical supernatural milieu and his protagonist, Jarek, as he comes into his own as an investigator and discovers more about himself and his ties to mysterious dark forces. The new characters, particularly Ulrika and Marcus, are engaging, with their own unique characterizations, providing grounding to support the mystery story. The villain is not one to be taken lightly, and Jones creates a great sense of danger and suspense. Overall, this is a fantastic sequel that will delight returning readers.
A thrilling and tense mystery with electrifying horror, featuring a detective with a heart of gold.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798986344058
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Water Sign Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
