An eccentric world of antiquarian booksellers comes alive in this uneven but often delightful mystery.
Charles offers the second installment in a cozy murder mystery series for book lovers, following Murder at the Estate Sale (2020).
The Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg, Florida, seems like an unlikely setting for foul play, but it provides a rich background for this appealing whodunit. Emma Clarke and Molly O’Donnell are both antiquarian booksellers based in Atlanta, and each year they meet up at the fair to show off, and hopefully sell, their most valuable acquisitions. When fellow bookseller Jasper Ross goes missing, along with several of Emma’s most sellable books, she teams up with Molly to find him. Shockingly, Jasper’s corpse turns up by a local hotel’s dumpster. Emma is horrified by his demise, and also concerned that the valuable books he borrowed may be lost forever. As local police investigate, other booksellers find that their own most valuable items are vanishing, too. When some of the tomes mysteriously reappear, the sellers are aghast that pages with color plates have been “surgically cut out.” Suddenly, the friendly, close-knit world of the fair takes on a sinister aura as Molly and Emma suspect customers and colleagues alike. They scour used-book and print shops looking for missing volumes, excised color plates, and clues regarding Jasper’s death. Along the way, they find allies and informants, including print dealer Stewart, who understands but deplores the illicit trade in stolen color plates. None of the characters in Charles’ novel are explored in great depth, although romantic tension between Molly and Emma builds to a crescendo, and Emma fights off pangs of jealousy when she meets one of Molly’s former loves. The plot is also sometimes slowed by the author’s atmospheric descriptions: “The shop had a lot of floral and herbal prints, maps, and advertisements from early twentieth-century magazines—hair tonics, radios, shoes, remedies: old ads for ‘Brylcreem—a Little Dab’ll Do Ya.’ ” As the plot unfolds, however, readers with interest in the world of booksellers, and the unusual characters who inhabit that world, are likely to be charmed and delighted.
An eccentric world of antiquarian booksellers comes alive in this uneven but often delightful mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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