An entertaining addition to a reliable beach-read series.
The new summer season is about to begin when the Institution, a spiritual/cultural/artistic center in Western New York, is stirred up by another murder of one of its prominent part-time residents.
Beautiful, wealthy 44-year-old socialite Connie de Palma roars up to her small cottage and steps out of her rented Porsche. Her new, young, and very handsome assistant/handyman, Jonas Carrington, exits from the passenger side. Mimi Goldman, former writer and editor for the New York Post and currently the sports reporter for the Chautauquan Daily, watches from her home down the street. Mimi has finally married her longtime squeeze, Walt, an epicurean, and she is now the grandmother of 8-month-old Charlie. Life is good. Until six days later, when Connie disappears, and Mimi and Jonas find her body by a stream in a popular gorge a few miles outside the grounds of the Institution. The local police decide there was no foul play, but Mimi is sure something is amiss. And so once again, Chautauqua’s intrepid amateur detective begins digging beneath the enclave’s genteel veneer. Everybody seems to be hiding one thing or another, and her investigations yield enough suspects to keep readers guessing. They also put Mimi in the crosshairs of the killer, which adds another thrill to this modern cozy. Solving the mystery, as usual, is only part of the fun in Pines’ Chautauquan series. Favorite repeat characters and gentle sendups of the Institution provide the laughs. For example, this season’s new sport is “Beckyball,” a hybrid of tennis and pickleball designed for the arthritic set not quite up to the rigors of tennis. Mimi’s delightful nonagenarian friend Sylvia Pritchard is back to share theories and to chauffeur Mimi around in her daughter’s Prius (Mimi, a New York City gal, never learned how to drive). And her adored son, Jake, who loves a good mystery as much as his mother, does the internet research. The narrative unspools gracefully and steadily, matching the recreational pace of the quaint setting, leaving time for enjoyable character-defining dialogue.
An entertaining addition to a reliable beach-read series.Pub Date: June 19, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2020
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
