An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.
In Diamond’s thriller, a guarded woman slowly opens herself to new possibilities as she deals with a conspiracy.
Thirty-two-year-old Claire Chastain is in a time of transition, which is causing her to run from commitment. Specifically, she’s run away from live-in boyfriend Peter,who made the mistake of thinking about proposing to her. She leaves her high-powered finance job in New York City and returns home to Washington, D.C., where she takes an accounting position for which she’s overqualified. She ostensibly came back to help her cantankerous grandmother Leonamove into an assisted living facility, but Claire’s new life becomes unduly complicated. For one, she’s being followed by a huge man in a 1971 Lincoln Continental. Then she learns that her paranoid friend Gavin was killed in a strange car accident. Finally, at work, Claire receives an odd spreadsheet, apparently as part of an audit of a pharmaceutical company. She soon finds herself being hunted by shadowy forces—and aided by a most unusual guardian angel. Initially, Diamond, the author of To Hell With Johnny Manic (2019), presents a protagonist whom some readers will find difficult to like. But after the author introduces the bitter Leona and reveals details of Claire’s formative years, readers will sympathize with the protagonist’s prickly nature. Importantly, the author has Claire experience some personal growth; specifically, she realizes that she must change her ways in order to thrive—and nudging her in that new direction is the wounded but gritty veteran that someone has hired to protect her. Diamond does a masterful job of unspooling the conspiracy at the heart of the story, and the quickly changing circumstances force Claire to learn how to improvise. (It certainly helps, however, that the bad guys have hired inept thugs to stalk her.) All through the narrative, Claire moves toward a new life path, and it will be intriguing to watch her develop further in planned future outings.
An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73413-922-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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