Maxwell, who always puts an interesting spin on her country-house mysteries set between the great wars, delivers once again...
A marriage made to save a family’s fortunes comes to a quick and unfortunate end.
Lady Julia Renshaw knows she has to marry a wealthy man to keep up the family estate even though she’s in love with someone else. Her sister Phoebe urges her to back out of her engagement to wealthy Viscount Annondale, who wants to produce an heir with an aristocratic wife. But Julia insists that if she can provide an heir and inherit the estate, the family will be secure for life once her much older husband passes on. She tells Phoebe that unless she marries well, their younger brother, Fox, will be unable to maintain the estate and provide for them. Strangely, Annondale insists that the wedding reception be held on the yacht named for his first wife and docked at Cowes. After a catered meal, he quickly dismisses his guests except for those who will accompany the couple on their honeymoon cruise: his sister, Veronica Townsend; his best man, Sir Hugh Fitzallen; Mr. Mowbry, the wedding photographer; and Annondale’s cheeky secretary, Mildred Blair. When Julia arrives at her family’s hotel in the middle of the night with a badly cut hand and a story of Annondale’s accusing her of flirting with the photographer in front of the crew, her sisters and her loyal former maid, Eva, realize that the honeymoon has well and truly ended. Julia returns to the yacht to find Annondale missing. When his body washes up near the yacht club and blood is found on the railing, she’s arrested for his murder. Both Phoebe and Eva have experience in solving mysteries (A Devious Death, 2017, etc.), and since they know Julia’s innocent and the police aren’t looking for other suspects, they plan to use all their sleuthing skills to find out who else wanted Annondale dead.
Maxwell, who always puts an interesting spin on her country-house mysteries set between the great wars, delivers once again in this tale of love, hate, revenge, and country houses in peril.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1739-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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