If the Booker Prize had a category for cozies, this would be a contender.
In a neat reversal on tales of fame and fortune in the big city, a pair of L.A. 20-somethings find adventure in rural Indiana.
Every perk Annie Sara Hart enjoys as the daughter of talent agent Bryan Hart comes with a hefty price tag. At 10, she was assigned the task of being best friends with Gray Hanover, the daughter of Bryan’s rich and famous client Camille Constantine, giving her access to a world of wealth and privilege but denying her the opportunity to make her own friends. Now in her late 20s, Annie Sara is still tethered to Gray, working at her Camille-funded boutique. When she inherits a derelict knitting shop in the Midwest from her uncle, she rejects Gray’s whiny claim that she can’t run Malibu Kids without her and demands two weeks off to check out the one thing in life that belongs to her alone. Her plan: assess her holdings, make renovations to render the shop marketable, sell up, come home. But Franklin, Indiana, is a revelation to her—a combination of welcoming and mysterious, with unexpected kindnesses and unexpected blind spots. (The murder of the shop’s previous owner, for example, is all but swept under the rug.) Instead of going home, Annie Sara has Gray shipped out to Indiana, along with a freezer full of restricted-calorie meals and instructions from Bryan and Camille to make sure Gray returns still able to fit into the minuscule jeans required for an upcoming photo shoot. But the young women have their own ideas, and seeing them take root and flourish is groundbreaking. Hechtman joyfully turns many timeworn cozy tropes on their heads. (Instead of an elderly maiden aunt, for example, Annie Sara inherits her windfall from a travel writer uncle who died on an expedition to Peru.) But most of all, she creates characters who are rich, complicated, and altogether human.
If the Booker Prize had a category for cozies, this would be a contender.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781448312931
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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