Race and privilege light the fuse in this classics-laced whodunit.
Class lines morph into clash lines when British aristocrats and police face off in this dead-on debut.
On the night before an Instagram influencer is found dead, Rupert Beauchamp, heir to a baronetcy, holds a tawdry black-tie 30th birthday bash at a London McDonald's, where guests wash down fast food with champagne and coke. The dead woman turns out to be Rupert's girlfriend, Clemmie O’Hara, whose body is discovered on Hampstead Heath by DI Caius Beauchamp (no relation to Rupert, but it's an intriguing coincidence that eventually explains a lot about Caius). Clemmie's death is convenient for the nasty Rupert because he's always loved Nell Waddingham, whom he can't marry because she's not posh enough. Nell works in publishing and adores classic novels, especially Jane Austen's, which she loves to read and post about. She’s Vassell’s most perfectly wrought character and, along with Caius, one of the few likable ones. On a recent trip to Greece with Rupert and Clemmie, she experienced a terrible act of violence (only hinted at later in the book) that she can't seem to understand or process. Caius is clear-eyed about what happened to her and wants justice for her and Clemmie. He's not afraid to set his sights on Rupert, even though his elite-enamored boss tells him to back off. Rupert, like all the other aimless upper-class millennials in this novel, can buy his way out of pretty much any criminal behavior, but will he get away with murder? There are plenty of other people in Clemmie's circle with strong motives, and Vassell serves them up with gimlet-eyed precision. This is a sturdy police procedural whose plot is sometimes knocked off kilter by Vassell's frequent sendups of her morally bankrupt characters, but the forthright Caius is a beacon of justice who makes this debut shine.
Race and privilege light the fuse in this classics-laced whodunit.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593685945
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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