Is the best surprise really no surprise? Not for mystery fans.
An officious chamber of commerce director meets an untimely end.
Although Wagner Lavoie has plenty of thoughts about how to promote small business in his hometown of Westham, Massachusetts, some of them seem pretty out there. Is it really a good idea to plan a spring festival in March, when the ground in Cape Cod is barely thawed? Or to cajole local merchants to offer freebies when there’s no guarantee of any financial gain? Mackenzie Almeida, owner of Mac’s Bikes, isn’t the only storekeeper to bridle at Lavoie’s demands. But one of the others must have been more than just ticked off by the prospect of having to offer free curried chicken soup samples to a mob of potential customers, because at the end of the surprisingly successful festival, the director is found squashed like a bug under a bookcase that’s toppled over inside the Book Nook. There’s no earthly reason for Mac to get involved in investigating Lavoie’s murder. Police chief Victoria Laitinen certainly hasn’t asked for her help. None of Mac’s nearest and dearest are under suspicion. As charming as Mac and her eccentric circle of friends may be, her author offers scant motivation for her heroine’s quest and even less real mystification standing in the way of its resolution. No tantalizing clues, no crafty red herrings, and precious little detection here.
Is the best surprise really no surprise? Not for mystery fans.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781496740557
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
Not by any means Klavan’s best, but in some inscrutable ways Klavan’s most.
Klavan, who’s evidently determined to make each adventure of assassin turned English teacher Cameron Winter more feverish than the last, turns up the heat again in this triple-decker tale.
As he sits in the office of therapist Margaret Whitaker, Winter is willing to talk endlessly about anything but Gwendolyn Lord, the previous therapist who was in love with him. He recalls his mission to track down Jerry Collins, a fellow agent of the shadowy Division who vanished while he was on his way to eliminate Istanbul child trafficker Kemal Balkin; his childhood love for Charlotte Shaefer, whose distinctive perfume he’s just smelled outside his apartment; and his reading of the joltingly fascist novel Treachery in the Night, whose heroine seems an awful lot like Charlotte. To Margaret’s complaints that he’s meandering, he replies: “In my mind, it’s all one story.” And that’s not even counting the unwelcome news that his academic colleague Roger Sexton plans to abandon his wife and young son and settle down with his student Barbara Finley, who turns out to have set her own sights more broadly. The stakes rise further when Winter follows a clue halfway across the country in hope of finding Ivy Swansag, the reclusive author of Treachery in the Night, and stumbles onto a trail even more violent than the one that led to Jerry Collins. Everyone involved in every one of the stories he spins for Margaret seems willing to blackmail, betray, or kill everyone else. Instead of hoping for a happy ending, readers will find themselves praying that this will all somehow come together.
Not by any means Klavan’s best, but in some inscrutable ways Klavan’s most.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781613165539
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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