An engaging mystery premise that’s let down by plodding pacing.
In Monnin’s series mystery, two vacationing Interpol agents investigate a murder while searching for a missing bracelet.
Stefanie Adams and Thomas Burkhardt are on a romantic getaway in St. George, Bermuda, taking a break from their work in the cultural heritage department of Interpol. Thomas’ main job is retrieving stolen artifacts, and Stefanie is part of his retrieval team; she also writes a travel blog. They’re renting a bungalow from archeologist Jeffrey Fitzsimmons, who enlists their help in trying to locate a missing gold and emerald bracelet. The artifact had initially been found at Fitzsimmons’ dig site at the Carmichael House, where the affluent Marlene and Lawrence Carmichael were hoping to place a designer garden. Stefanie and Thomas quickly begin posing questions to the rest of the team: Allan Ingram, a University of Virginia professor; Hunter Renko and Daphne Pasinski, Ingram’s students; and Beryl Swan, Fitzsimmons’ assistant. Other possible suspects include landscape architect Nathaniel Dimon and Fabiola Ortiz of the Spanish Cultural Ministry. Later, Stefanie and Thomas find a member of the team dead, and another is arrested for the murder; then the Carmichaels experience a break-in. Stefanie and Thomas race to find the culprit and the missing piece of jewelry, and their prime suspect changes with every new piece of information. Monnin’s story has echoes of Agatha Christie’s work, making the most of a large group of suspects and red herrings galore. The romance between Thomas and Stefanie, though only briefly developed, effectively adds another dimension to the tale (“What she really wanted was to decide on their future living situation. There was no question that they would be together”). However, the story is very much a slow burn, and the characters aren’t engaging enough to warrant such pacing. There are a few significant plot turns, but the story is mainly made up of Thomas and Stefanie questioning other characters and offering their opinions on who’s the most suspicious among them. The action picks up a bit toward the end, but the unsatisfying ending falls somewhere between a bang and a whimper.
An engaging mystery premise that’s let down by plodding pacing.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781685126483
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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