A leisurely murder story that could use a little tightening up.
A Chicago cop unravels a Homeric murder in Marriott’s debut mystery.
Thirty years ago, Virgil Colvin and his wife, Janet, honeymooned on the Greek island of Ithaca. About a year ago, Janet died, and Virgil realized he couldn’t go on living in the Windy City without her. Six months ago, the 51-year-old left his job with the Chicago police and relocated, with his extensive personal library, to Ithaca’s biggest town, Vathy, to try to replicate those happy times with Janet. It turns out that starting over in a new country is harder than he anticipated. Perpetually buzzed on ouzo and with no knowledge of Greek, Virgil makes few connections aside from Costas Pantakalas, the Vathy police chief who rarely handles crimes more serious than tourists getting pickpocketed. Then, two remarkable things happen: A violent late-night earthquake jostles the island, and, the next morning, the body of a murdered tourist is found at the foot of the Odysseus statue in Vathy’s town square. Unused to dealing with crimes of this magnitude, Costas requests Virgil’s help in finding the killer. When Virgil discovers that the tourist was actually a British spy, he realizes that he, too, is out of his depth—but by that point, he’s become enmeshed in a history-inflected mystery like something out of his books. The author’s breezy prose details the food, landscape, and picturesque architecture of Ithaca, giving the book a pleasant vacation atmosphere: “Vathy was too small and compact to really have a locals-only area, or a hidden hideout—tourists in the high season went everywhere with ease, clumsy innocence and curiosity. However, Circe’s Well taverna was as close to a locals-only haunt as one could find.” Greek history buffs will enjoy Marriott’s inclusion of archaeological sites, mythological references, and academic disputes about the location of Homer’s Ithaca. The plot is a bit shaggy (the book checks in at over 400 pages), but hopefully the author will slim things down for the further Virgil and Costas mysteries he undoubtedly has planned.
A leisurely murder story that could use a little tightening up.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781800164208
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.
Parker’s Jesse Stone series continues with more trouble in Paradise, Massachusetts.
Police Chief Jesse Stone does a welfare check at the urging of a local citizen named Matthew Peebles and discovers a dead body in a room piled high with trash and old Polaroids depicting murder victims, either garroted or shot in the head. Who werethese victims? Chief Stone improbably keeps the investigation local—no need to complicate the story with the state police or the FBI—and that helps maintain the small-town flavor of this entertaining tale. Stone hires a new cop, Derek Tate, for his understaffed department. But to put it mildly, Tate is a poor fit. Boss and newcomer have radically different concepts of policing: Stone sees himself as a servant of his community, while Tate only wants to catch criminals and crack heads. At one point, Stone asks him what he did on his shift: “Did you give a tourist directions? Did you help an old lady cross the street or get a little girl’s cat out of a tree? Anything at all like that?” Tate replies “That’s not what real cops do,” and proceeds to alienate “beloved institutional figure” Daisy, cafe owner and longtime provider of donuts and muffins to Paradise’s finest. Indeed, Tate could be a model fascist, and Stone’s biggest mistake is not firing him. Meanwhile, Peebles fears for his life because of his “aging mobster” great uncle, who just might have something to do with all those murders. If Peebles says anything to the cops, he knows he’s a dead man. Hell, he’s probably doomed anyway. Stone is a stand-up cop who puts his life on the line for the town he loves, and his dealings with friends and colleagues are fun to witness: “I’m the chief. I’m supposed to tell you what to do,” he tells Molly Crane, his deputy chief. “It’s adorable that you think that,” she replies. And when all Paradise cops are banned from Daisy’s cafe because of Tate’s stupidity, Stone navigates treacherous territory while showing respect. This is Farnsworth’s first entry in the series created by Robert Parker, and fans will be pleased.
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593544761
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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