This charming collision of Agatha Christie and The Love Boat will delight fans of classic mysteries.
Acting roles are pretty sparse for women over 60, so British actress Suzy Marshall seizes the opportunity to play Lady Bracknell in a Swiss production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Things go terribly awry, though, and she unexpectedly finds herself playing detective on a cruise ship.
Suzy might have seen the writing on the wall earlier: Reg, the director, had some very strange ideas, including desecrating the famous handbag scene with a barbershop quartet, and the actors’ flights to Zurich were all cobbled together with last-minute tickets. Luckily, her fellow actors were marvelous—except for whiny Stan Arbuthnot—especially Jason Scott, a young man eager to plot with Suzy behind Reg’s back. Yet the morning after Jason escapes a sketchy party hosted by the play’s financial backer, the play is suddenly cancelled, return plane tickets voided, and all the actors' bank accounts drained. Suzy and Jason land entertainment jobs aboard the Blue Mermaid, a ship bound for New York. Together they begin some online sleuthing, trying to piece together what happened in Zurich. Meanwhile, Amanda Herbert has found herself homeless for a few weeks, pending the closing of her purchase of a London flat from a jittery seller. Treating herself to a cruise sounds wonderful, and soon, via internet, Amanda takes possession of the flat, letting her son housesit for her. All is well until Amanda’s son is mysteriously arrested. With sly, charming villains committing dastardly deeds, Olivier award-winning actor Imrie (Nice Work (If You Can Get It), 2016, etc.) brings her own theatrical experience to bear on this refreshing whodunit, carefully tightening the strings bringing Amanda, Suzy, Jason, the villain, and a constellation of quirky characters (including Myriam La-Grande-Motte with her hilarious malapropisms) together.
This charming collision of Agatha Christie and The Love Boat will delight fans of classic mysteries.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-183-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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