A fun beach read with a bit of tension and enjoyable, biting social commentary.
The specter of death once again hovers over Val and Roddy DeVere in the seventh volume of Tichi’s Gilded Age mystery series.
It is the middle of the summer season of 1899 in Newport, Rhode Island. Society’s elites are enjoying their annual festivities, away from the heat of New York City and Boston. Valentine (Val) Louise Mackle, daughter of an Irish immigrant who made a fortune in silver mining, and Roderick (Roddy) Windham DeVere, scion of Manhattan’s upper-crust Knickerbocker crowd, have been married for almost four years, but society has yet to completely accept the veteran of Colorado mining camps as one of their own. Still recuperating from the couple’s last, almost fatal adventure, Val attends a grand event with trepidation. Her forebodings are validated when the couple meets with the host of the celebration, their friend Theodore (Theo) Bulkeley, who indicates that he has family troubles before he mysteriously disappears. The DeVeres receive a telegram: “Please Help. Reply Manhattan Club. Theo.” The next day, they depart Newport and head for their New York home. When they rendezvous with Theo, Val and Roddy learn that he believes that the ostensibly accidental death of his beloved cousin Judith Winthipp was in fact due to murder, and he fears her twin sister Phoebe will be the next to meet a violent end. Although the adventurous murder mystery is intriguing and full of twists and turns, it is Val’s (Tichi’s narrator) delightfully acerbic descriptions of the upper class’ strictly proscribed excesses and constraints that propel the narrative. Roddy, an attorney by profession, is a charming amateur cocktail mixologist who creates tempting new beverages; following the series’ tradition, recipes for each of his latest concoctions (which are in great demand in the era’s finer restaurants and watering holes) pop up throughout the novel. There are also plenty of compelling historical tidbits and abundant details about the development of Manhattan’s Upper West Side luxury apartments around the turn of the century, with the Dakota and its many accoutrements prominently featured in the story.
A fun beach read with a bit of tension and enjoyable, biting social commentary.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9789695592946
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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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