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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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