An intriguing whodunit with richly drawn characters.
In Berman’s mystery novel, a true-crime podcaster immerses himself in the overprivileged world of a “despicable lot” after a member of the group dies in an apparent suicide.
Police detective Sean Strickland is assigned to the case of Alex Sable, the 30-year-old son of a billionaire who apparently committed suicide in the bathroom at his best friend’s wedding: “Of all times to kill yourself! It’s very selfish,” the wedding planner rails. “The best man. Do you know anyone who would do something like that?” Tyler, a popular podcaster who’s come to this part of New England to investigate the fentanyl epidemic, has questions and increasing suspicions about Alex’s death, which Strickland says could be suicide but also could be an accident or a homicide. Tyler talks with members of the wedding party and Alex’s friends, including Will and Jessica, the shattered bride and groom; famed Instagram influencer Lulu Swanson; Alex’s former high school classmate Maxie Stein-Golden; Rob, a trader, who’s “always just a few seconds late, a few meters short, a few words off”; and Yael, a “perfectly nice” doctor. Through these interactions, Tyler unearths the inevitable secrets and scandals that bind the group together and threaten to tear their lives apart. As Alex’s life comes more into focus, the question of whether his death was self-inflicted or inflicted by another remains elusive. Berman’s debut novel is an instantly addictive read. “Tyler found Alex Sable three hours after he had been declared dead” is the kind of opening upon which entire TV series have been launched, and the large cast of characters mostly avoids falling into whodunit clichés; Lulu, for example, makes Tyler “unnerved” when he finds his assumptions to be flawed: “She looked like she should say like every ten seconds and instead she dropped words like expound and maudlin.” Berman also drops in some fine literary references; the book’s title, for instance, comes from a Sylvia Plath poem. More Metropolitan than Gossip Girl, this novel makes for an entertaining spin on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line that “the very rich…are different than you and me."
An intriguing whodunit with richly drawn characters.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781800165229
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Vanguard Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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