An entertaining novel, but a tad too clever for its own good.
A metafiction that combines a murder mystery set at a storied upstate New York hunting club in the 1970s and lessons on the mystery genre; the author, MSNBC news producer McDorman, is making his fiction debut.
Young private detective Adam McAnnis, a Vietnam veteran through whose "sad and wary" but amused eyes the story is told, has been hired by one of the guests at the club's annual Fourth of July gathering to investigate a possible plot against that guest. Until a female guest is found dead in the lake, an apparent suicide, there's no indication of anything untoward going on, except for some pot smoking and the adulterous couplings in two designated rooms in the clubhouse (in one of which McAnnis is happy to "interrogate" a straying wife). But murder is very much afoot, and as we are lectured in long, informed commentaries by the "author" of the mystery, "[a]ren’t the suspense and anticipation the real secret thrill of the book?" There are examinations of plot and method and the first-person narrative technique ("a point of view you have viewed with suspicion ever since your first innocent reading of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"), as well as references to Shakespeare and Sophocles, Dashiell Hammett and Patricia Highsmith, "locked room" specialist John Dickson Carr and Thomas De Quincey’s essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” While such material is interesting enough, it fails to resonate with this murder mystery, which concludes with the reader joining the cast of characters.
An entertaining novel, but a tad too clever for its own good.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780593537572
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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