A well-written and auspicious mystery series opener.
In this novel, a woman with a “macabre talent” for finding missing bodies seeks justice and personal closure when she helps police with a recent spate of kidnappings.
Eleanor Clay is brought in by the Bristlecone Springs Police Department for her unique brand of help in the case of missing 3-year-old Lizzie Barrett. She has found 18 children for the department over the last decade, and Det. Gordon Stanislaus is confident she will be successful: “She would find the child, and that child would be dead, case closed.” Eleanor does locate Lizzie, but the girl is still alive, albeit barely. This is new for Eleanor. As child kidnappings mount (three in two months), she aligns herself with CorpsPursuit, a volunteer consortium of forensic scientists who look for bodies in cold cases. “I came here thinking you might be able to help me understand what I’ve been doing all these years, and then maybe I’d have somewhere to start, you know, some way to figure out why it’s changed,” she tells Althea Giordano, formerly with the London Police and a botanist with CorpsPursuit. Eleanor is beset with considerable psychological turmoil. Her own daughter drowned years ago, and her body was never recovered. It drove a wedge between her and her husband, who are separated but not divorced, as well as her teenage son, Levi. Cooper has crafted a textured series opener that’s part gripping mystery and part an involving character study that sets up CorpsPursuit as a going concern. She writes with a keen eye: The letter seeking CorpsPursuit volunteers “had been printed out and posted on the Bristlecone Springs bulletin board and had since been nearly papered over with notices of community service days and for sale flyers.” Eleanor’s “domestic superpower” is a bit confusing at first (why do the police wait to bring her in on cases?), but the author populates the story with fleshed-out characters worthy of their own series, such as charismatic bicycle patrol officer Elan DePena, who initially refers to Eleanor as “the grim reaper.” The growth of their mutually beneficial partnership is one of the novel’s pleasures.
A well-written and auspicious mystery series opener.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 9781639885497
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2022
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
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