Will this latest case follow the meteoric curve of the victim’s bestselling debut? Don’t hold your breath.
Or Death by Print, since prodigiously successful Jason Verdoodt seems to have been bashed to death by a copy of his own first novel.
That novel, The White Owl, has just sold its millionth copy, and the leading lights at St. Rumwold’s, the Oxford college where Verdoodt teaches archaeology and anthropology, have joined with Sir Boniface Castle, Verdoodt’s publisher, to celebrate. The only one missing from the festivities is Verdoodt, who surely would have attended if he hadn’t already been killed, his body found at the bottom of a staircase. Even though his home base is the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, DCI Arthur St. Just is on hand as the plus-one of his fiancee, criminologist and crime writer Portia De’Ath, and he quickly decides to back up the impetuous DCI Ampleforth of the Thames Valley Police. There’s no lack of suspects. Verdoodt had a reputation for romancing every woman in sight. Minette Miniver, his long-ago girlfriend, had crashed the party in the faint hope of winning him back. David Castle, the publisher’s son and editor-in-chief, was worried that Verdoodt was going to leave Castle Publishing for a more lucrative offer from a more well-established press. And David’s assistant, Gita Patel, has made a discovery about The White Owl that puts the whole case on a different footing. Malliet sketches in the characters so briefly that they’re hard to remember from chapter to chapter, and the solution is likely to disappoint everyone but die-hard Oxonians. But readers will get to pass a few hours in a setting a good deal more august than their reading spaces.
Will this latest case follow the meteoric curve of the victim’s bestselling debut? Don’t hold your breath.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781448311200
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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