A fun, inventive murder mystery set on a wintry Atlantic island.
A woman with a perfect memory must solve a murder at the center of a wealthy, dysfunctional family in Giebfried and Wells’ mystery, the first in a series.
It’s 1955, and Alexandra Durant’s final year of graduate school isn’t going according to plan. First, she’s kicked out of her psychology program less than a year before completing her dissertation. (The reason? Not being “likable” enough.) Then she’s offered the chance to reenroll—but only if she does a favor for her professor, John Marlowe. Marlowe hires Alexandra to work as a maid for his mother for one month at the sprawling mansion on the family’s private island off Maine’s coast. It’s a strange request, but Alexandra needs to graduate, and the money John offers her will pay for her own mother’s medical treatment. Alexandra arrives on Exeter Island to find things not quite as John described them. First of all, his mother is dead! Her six children and their significant others—all of them quite odd—have descended on the island along with an estranged friend of the family named Isidore Lennox, whose presence causes quite the stir. At least the estate will be easy to sort out. John, the oldest, will inherit everything. Then John is murdered, leaving each of the 12 people on the island a possible suspect. Everyone is suspicious of one another. The only one Alexandra can trust is herself. Luckily, she has spent years developing a photographic memory—indeed, memory is the topic of her dissertation—making her the perfect sleuth to get to the bottom of the crime. She’ll need to hurry. Several of her housemates may be much more dangerous than they initially seemed. In solving his murder, maybe Alexandra can figure out the other mystery that’s been bothering her: Why did John hire her to be his mother’s maid the day after his mother died?
Giebfried and Wells deliver a wonderfully atmospheric murder mystery on foggy, snowbound Exeter Island. The location makes the lead’s circumstances feel even more remote and dangerous, while the incessant bickering of the surviving Marlowes creates an almost unbearable claustrophobia. The prose is exact and attuned to Alexandra’s analytical perspective. Here, before he dies, John gives her instructions for navigating the strange scenario involving multiple overbearing personalities: “Now, you’ll be thrown into certain situations while you’re here, and—like a good psychologist—you need to react appropriately. No judgment. No criticism. Nothing makes you uncomfortable. Understand?” The novel is a long one at over 500 pages, and its shifts in tone—moving easily from suspense to humor to horror to satire—keep the reader from ever getting too comfortable. Alexandra’s virtuosic memory and poor people skills make her a delightful detective, and the people around her provide an endless series of foils. The twists keep coming all the way to a satisfying ending. Perhaps the most exciting development is the promise of future Alexandra Durant cases to come.
A fun, inventive murder mystery set on a wintry Atlantic island.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-958711-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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