The third book in a series is an entertaining mystery steeped in local lore.
Back in action on her beloved Italian island of Ischia, amateur detective Nonna Maria uses her grandmotherly wiles to prevent the killing of a carabinieri captain and to help lead a young woman to her late grandfather’s hidden treasure.
Nearly a decade ago, before he settled in Ischia, the old widow’s friend Captain Paolo Murino and his team of carabinieri took down the notorious Red Squad mob and its ruthless boss, Guido Ostino, up in Florence. From prison, Ostino has plotted a revenge killing, which Nonna and another friend, a reformed hit man called Il Presidente, hope to thwart. The unknown treasure is in one of the caves on Ischia where contraband and other stuff has been hidden for decades. Nonna calls on a duo that knows the caves, dubbed the Magician and the Pirate, to find the goods, which rival treasure hunters will do anything to lay their hands on. In both cases, Nonna Maria isn’t fazed about the possible risks to herself. Her paramount concern is to help friends in need, whatever their backgrounds—making sure they’re properly caffeinated and fed with great home-cooked meals. Though the dual plots are nicely handled, the novel is best enjoyed for its history and culture. Carcaterra takes us back centuries to the Cemetery of Dead Nuns, where the bodies of nuns of a certain order were left in seated positions on stone “death chairs.” He introduces us to the Mourners, a group of women formed in 1943 who lost husbands and sons in the Allied bombings of Italy and were determined to “cause chaos for the enemy.” As for the hundreds of cases of wine supposedly hidden in the caves—“That’s my idea of a lost treasure,” says Nonna Maria.
The third book in a series is an entertaining mystery steeped in local lore.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593499214
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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