A light, enjoyable page-turner that will particularly appeal to fans of the Northern California coast.
In Carroll’s latest mystery series installment, amateur sleuth Trisha Carson investigates a suspicious open water swimming accident that resulted in a gruesome death.
Trisha, whose day job is working in the guest services department for the San Francisco Giants baseball team, attends the funeral of wealthy financier and open water swimmer Andy Barlow, who was chopped to pieces by a yacht propeller while training in San Francisco Bay. Andy was in business with his brother, Martin, who was secretly jealous of his sibling’s athleticism and annoyed by his preoccupation with swimming instead of working; he was also sleeping with Andy’s wife, Justine—or so says Harrison, Andy’s son, who wants Trisha, a skilled amateur detective, to look into his father’s death. She’s initially skeptical that foul play was involved, as the U.S. Coast Guard already ruled Andy’s death an accident. Still, she agrees to investigate with the assistance of her sister, Lena. She interrogates Justine, who’s either evasive or clueless about her family’s finances and seems to be hiding something about her relationship with Martin. Trisha later finds out that Justine wanted to break things off with Andy, and that hired goons from Las Vegas had come to collect on hisgambling debt. As more of Andy’s unsavory behavior comes to light, the suspect list only grows longer. Carroll’s novel features snappy dialogue, brisk characterizations of the Barlow family and their entourage, and generous helpings of technical detail about open water swimming. It also shows the author’s clear affection for the canyons, flora, and coastline of the San Francisco Bay Area: “Sausalito gleamed in the morning sun….Fall was San Francisco Bay’s summer, complete with warm weather, dazzling Pacific Ocean sunsets, and cloudless nights.” Overall, it’s a conventional but enjoyable whodunit with a plot that offers readers a round robin of familiar suspects; as such, the final reveal is unsurprising but still satisfying.
A light, enjoyable page-turner that will particularly appeal to fans of the Northern California coast.Pub Date: March 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781644567951
Page Count: -
Publisher: Indies United Publishing House, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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