A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.
A widowed brain surgeon investigates a murder in Smallwood’s mystery novel, a prequel to her detective series.
Santa Christina is an idyllic California town shaded by the lemonadeberry–covered slopes of Mount Reposo. It’s a quiet place, where the most fearsome predator is the occasional coyote. Dr. Ogy Bradley is shocked when he returns from a conference to discover that his neighbor and close friend, noted hillside gardener Babby Blenheim, has been killed in a mudslide. (It appears the sprinklers in her orchid garden malfunctioned.) Ogy, a widowed brain surgeon, can’t believe that Babby’s death was an accident. The person tasked with investigating the death is Ogy’s friend from the diving club, Detective Tor Abelove of the Santa Christina Police Department. Tor has always been a surfer first and a cop second, but he’s still a pretty good detective. He figures out that Babby was bludgeoned to death prior to the mudslide, but there’s no clear motive and no obvious suspects. Who would benefit from the orchid lady’s death? A local burglar? Her adopted niece and nephew, who would inherit her money? A rival gardener? A local politician with an acrimonious history? As Ogy and Tor look into the case, they quickly discover the ground beneath their feet is just as unstable as Babby’s hillside orchid field. Smallwood is a prose stylist, and her serpentine, often surprising sentences give the novel its playful, puzzling atmosphere: “Luis Paredes’ tactic of protecting his best second-hand shirt by sitting out a paintball war inside a cardboard carton had two major consequences—the attempted murder of his brother, and the apprehension of a burglar who for months had eluded police.” She hides the ball by nearly overwhelming readers with character detail and backstory, but the maximalism is part of the fun. New readers will be glad to know that previous Cop & Doc mysteries are waiting to be read.
A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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