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
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
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.
A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.
FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
