A carefree tale that’s often enjoyable despite occasional clichés.
An English gentleman finds his inheritance threatened as he’s accused of murder in this mannered comedic mystery.
It’s 1920, and Maj. Heathcliff Lennox, a veteran of the First World War, receives distressing news from his butler, Greggs: There’s a dead man lying on his doorstep—truly an uncommon circumstance in sleepy rural England—which kicks off Menuhin’s often humorous story. Lennox has no idea who the man might be nor how he ended up delivered, like a parcel, to his property, but then he finds a sheet of paper hidden in the corpse’s coat with a stranger’s name written on it: Countess Sophia Androvich Zerevki Polyakov. To confound matters further, he later finds out that his uncle, Lord Melrose, has recently asked the very same Sophia to marry him. She turns out to be a supporter of czarist rule who recently escaped the carnage of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Sophia proves herself to be something of an imperious sort, herself; she’s taken over the quarters that had long been reserved for Lennox himself, and she dismissively expels Cooper, the aging butler of the manor, from the premises. She even kicks out Lennox’s dog—before bluntly announcing that Melrose has amended his will to leave her the whole of his considerable fortune. Lennox suspects that something is awry with this whole arrangement—particularly after he overhears Peregrine Kingsley, a longtime lawyer and counselor to Lord Melrose, engaged in intimate and conspiratorial conversation with Natasha Czerina Orlakov-Palen, who’s Sophia’s niece and the fiancee of his own cousin, Edgar. Then Lennox discovers Sophia’s bloodied body, shot dead with his own gun. He’s the principal suspect, and now he’s compelled to devote his Christmas to clearing his own name.
Menuhin conveys the entire story in lighthearted quips and genteel witticisms, hewing to the tradition of classic, madcap British comedy. For instance, it’s revealed that Lennox’s family has been historically plagued by the aforementioned Kingsley, who’s as boundlessly unscrupulous as he is incompetent; it’s never clear why he’s never been dismissed, but his presence is a constant source of delight to readers whenever he appears. The relentlessness of Menuhin’s comedic style can grow exhausting, though, as it sometimes has the feel of a literary stand-up routine. Some of the jokes barely elicit a polite chuckle, as when Lennox chats with Greggs: “Greggs was right; the man looked very dead. ‘Did you check?’ I asked. ‘No, sir—back’s been playing up.’…‘Your paunch is more of an impediment than your spine, Greggs.’ ‘As you say, sir.’ ” For the most part, the characters tend to be stock caricatures rather than nuanced and complex people. For example, Sophia is, at best, a vaudevillian sendup of the stereotypical Russian aristocrat; even her accent is gratingly ridiculous. However, the murder mystery itself is a fine diversion, and readers who may be looking for some very silly entertainment—which is neither too serious nor too literary and which makes minimal demands—will find this a companionable read.
A carefree tale that’s often enjoyable despite occasional clichés.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-916294-70-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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