A richly detailed, engaging whodunit set amid the glitter of 19th-century Newport.
A murder mystery focuses on the elites of the Gilded Age.
In this series opener, a silver mine heiress from Nevada and her New York Four Hundred husband team up to investigate the deaths of several members of the city’s high society. Valentine Mackle left the freedom of her Western upbringing behind to follow the strict rules of society when she married Roderick DeVere, a cocktail enthusiast and member of New York’s elite. Val, who is still sorting out which fork to use—while spending the summer in Newport, Rhode Island, as most of the Four Hundred do—relies on her friend Cassie Forster for both emotional and practical support. But as the book opens, Cassie is the one who needs help, having just discovered that her great-aunt’s recent death may have been murder. When Cassie’s cousin dies under similar circumstances and she seems to be under threat as well, Val and Roddy hire bodyguards, investigate clues, and chase down a killer. The variety of plausible suspects will keep readers wondering who did it until the novel’s final chapters, which provide a satisfying resolution. Tichi is the author of a nonfiction book about the Gilded Age elite, What Would Mrs. Astor Do? (2018). Although it can occasionally feel as if her research makes itself a bit too obvious as she re-creates the world of Newport cottages and private train cars in this story, she does an excellent job of bringing the setting to life with vivid language (Cassie’s “arched brow was a signal shot across the damask tablecloth and bone china plates with our host’s newly minted coat-of-arms”). Readers who prefer their historical fiction draped in satin, governed by strict rules of behavior, and blessed with fabulous wealth will enjoy the period-piece accuracy of the tale, while cocktail enthusiasts will appreciate Roddy’s recipes, which appear throughout the work. The mystery itself is a fresh twist on a genre trope, and the story as a whole is solid despite some uneven pacing.
A richly detailed, engaging whodunit set amid the glitter of 19th-century Newport.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63972-518-2
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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