An unusual twist rooted in the recent horrors of World War I adds interest to a typical country-house mystery.
Money may be the root of all evil, but is it the motive for murder?
Julia and Phoebe Renshaw know they must make wealthy marriages to keep the estate of the Earl of Wroxley afloat. But duty is rubbing up against love, especially for Julia, the beautiful elder daughter enamored of a nobleman whose estate is near ruin. The daughters have been invited to visit their cousin Regina Brockhurst, who’s just purchased a home with the money she inherited from her father—much to the dismay of her mother, Lady Mandeville, her brother, Hastings, and his wife, Verna, who were left with little to support their pretensions. Phoebe’s trusted maid, Eva, and Julia’s sulky new maid, Miss Myra Stanley, are greeted by Regina’s dear friend Olive Asquith, whom they take for an upper-level servant. But it’s not so: Regina and Olive are making do with only a cook and her helper. Regina is mysterious about her plans for her new home, and when her unhappy relatives arrive with the family lawyer, they immediately accuse her of killing her father. The fog of enmity thickens when Regina is found dead in her bed, stabbed with the dowager’s hatpin. Phoebe and Eva, no strangers to crime-solving (A Pinch of Poison, 2016, etc.), know that the investigation will mostly be in the hands of Eva’s love, Constable Miles Brannock. Regina’s family would prefer to believe she was killed by Olive, an apparent outsider whose socialist tendencies belie her wealthy background. As they watch the family’s feeble gestures of mourning—Hastings floats around in what appears to be a whiskey-induced stupor, while his mother and wife shed no tears for Regina—the two sleuths devise a clever plan to catch the killer.
An unusual twist rooted in the recent horrors of World War I adds interest to a typical country-house mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-838-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
© Copyright 2025 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.
