An immersive first outing for a crime-solving odd couple.
An aging concierge and a desperate private eye team up in Craft’s mystery series starter.
Fifty-something Dante O’Donnell moved to Palm Springs seven years ago, giving up a not-so-successful acting career to marry his doctor boyfriend, Anthony Gascogne. Two years ago, Anthony asked for a divorce, and a few months afterward, he was murdered in an apparent break-in. Now Dante is working for a vacation rental company, looking after properties and some of the VIP clients. While assisting a wealthy art dealer, Dante runs into Jazz Friendly, the officer who investigated Anthony’s murder. Jazz has since lost her job and is now working as a rent-a-cop, providing security for the art dealer’s merchandise while moonlighting as a private detective. Dante and Jazz hate each other—Jazz wrongly arrested Dante for his husband’s killing, which indirectly caused her to lose her job—but when Jazz saves Dante from being framed for a different crime, the two call a truce. In fact, she asks if he might be able to drum up some PI business for her among the wealthy vacationing set. Dante agrees, but when a body turns up in the swimming pool of one of his rentals, he and Jazz are thrown into a caper that’s larger than either could have expected. Craft’s prose style is dry and sharp, perfect for the desert resort milieu of the aging rich and those who make their living from them. For example, here, Dante visits Jazz’s office in the back of a coffee shop for the first time: “Taped to the inside of the glass was a makeshift sign that I recognized as a photocopy of Jazz’s business card, which had been enlarged several times….I assumed Jazz didn’t get many walk-ins.” Dante and Jazz make for an intriguing pair, as both are flawed in their own embarrassing ways, and both are searching for something to fill the voids in their lives. Craft has long been an inventive mystery writer, and this new series promises to add a bit of grit to his distinctively colorful brand of storytelling.
An immersive first outing for a crime-solving odd couple.Pub Date: May 2, 2022
ISBN: 9781954841994
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Brash Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
