A fun rags-to-riches tale in an engaging mystery helmed by an appealing protagonist.
An extraordinary surprise inheritance places a resourceful young nurse’s life in danger in this mystery/thriller.
Twenty-seven-year-old Tori Winters is working as a hospice nurse in Springfield, Missouri, when she receives a phone call that Horace Milburn, one of her patients, has died. Although Horace was in hospice care at home, Tori is surprised that he succumbed so quickly because he had been feeling better in recent days. She arrives at the Russell house, where Horace had been living with his daughter, Amelia, and son-in-law, Charlie, and discovers that too few of his pain medication pills are in their container. Tori suspects foul play, and she becomes the prime witness in Charlie’s murder trial. After continued harassment by Charlie’s two brothers, Earl and Farley, culminating in a bullet smashing through her living room window, Tori decides it is time to get out of town. Then she receives a phone call from attorney Jonah Greer in Granbury, Texas, saying he has important business to discuss with her. She sets out for Texas but not before covering her tracks by telling everyone in Springfield that she is moving to Colorado. She meets with Jonah and learns that her paternal grandmother, Elly Leichter, who she had been told died decades earlier, has just recently passed away. Elly left her entire estate to Tori, including an old mansion in need of repair. Tori falls in love with the mysterious house and inherits a world of danger. Dickason’s series opener features an intriguing hero. And the house—with its unique history; intricately described, valuable antiques; and many secrets—offers plenty of opportunities for future plotlines. Tori intends to turn the “white elephant” into a bed-and-breakfast (“The house was a mish-mash of arched windows, plain and stained glass, and gingerbread trim”). Several attempts on Tori’s life provide adequate moments of moderate tension, and there is an ample supply of possible suspects. Although there are no big final surprises, the entertaining narrative moves along at a healthy clip, building a collection of captivating secondary characters who are likely to appear in the sequel, with one who may become a romantic interest.
A fun rags-to-riches tale in an engaging mystery helmed by an appealing protagonist.Pub Date: July 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781734082197
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Mystic Circle Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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