An engaging but somewhat placid mystery with a feline sleuth.
In this third installment of a series, a Midwestern architect and a clever cat are pulled back into the detective game when a Hollywood movie—and a Hollywood murder—comes to town.
Architect and amateur sleuth Brody Norris is building his dream home in Dumont, Wisconsin, with his husband (and former uncle by marriage), Marson Miles. Brody is also catsitting for his friend Mary Questman while she’s out of town: a welcome chance to spend extra time with his favorite talking Abyssinian cat, Mister Puss. But the real excitement in Dumont is that the favorite local son, Hollywood actor Thad Manning, has returned to direct a film based on his childhood there. The citizens of Dumont are invited to serve as extras—and there’s even a role for a certain feline. As is typical in Dumont, nothing ever goes without a hitch, and the production soon suffers from the tragic death of the crew electrician. Brody’s friend Sheriff Thomas Simms suspects foul play, and it isn’t long before the architect and Mister Puss are pulled into the investigation. Thad and his production have more enemies than one might expect—he and his wife, the billionaire heiress Paige Yeats, have designs in Dumont beyond the movie—and, to make everything even more stressful, Brody’s mother, the combative lesbian Inez Norris, has come back to town. Craft writes in typically polished prose, illustrating his characters with precision and humor, as when Brody describes Inez: “I hadn’t seen her in three years, but even at a distance, I could see she hadn’t changed much…a hippie of sorts, older and wiser. She wore leotards with an East Indian tunic and a billowing mohair stole to ward off the chill of a late-October afternoon.” Despite the familiar touches, this latest volume is perhaps not quite as gripping or colorful as the previous entrants in the series—it takes its time getting going, and the mystery element is somewhat sidelined by other drama. (Perhaps part of the problem is that the novelty of a talking cat and Brody’s May-December marriage have lost a bit of their shine.) Even so, fans of Mister Puss will likely still enjoy this personality-filled and altogether pleasant sojourn in Dumont.
An engaging but somewhat placid mystery with a feline sleuth.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.
Parker’s Jesse Stone series continues with more trouble in Paradise, Massachusetts.
Police Chief Jesse Stone does a welfare check at the urging of a local citizen named Matthew Peebles and discovers a dead body in a room piled high with trash and old Polaroids depicting murder victims, either garroted or shot in the head. Who werethese victims? Chief Stone improbably keeps the investigation local—no need to complicate the story with the state police or the FBI—and that helps maintain the small-town flavor of this entertaining tale. Stone hires a new cop, Derek Tate, for his understaffed department. But to put it mildly, Tate is a poor fit. Boss and newcomer have radically different concepts of policing: Stone sees himself as a servant of his community, while Tate only wants to catch criminals and crack heads. At one point, Stone asks him what he did on his shift: “Did you give a tourist directions? Did you help an old lady cross the street or get a little girl’s cat out of a tree? Anything at all like that?” Tate replies “That’s not what real cops do,” and proceeds to alienate “beloved institutional figure” Daisy, cafe owner and longtime provider of donuts and muffins to Paradise’s finest. Indeed, Tate could be a model fascist, and Stone’s biggest mistake is not firing him. Meanwhile, Peebles fears for his life because of his “aging mobster” great uncle, who just might have something to do with all those murders. If Peebles says anything to the cops, he knows he’s a dead man. Hell, he’s probably doomed anyway. Stone is a stand-up cop who puts his life on the line for the town he loves, and his dealings with friends and colleagues are fun to witness: “I’m the chief. I’m supposed to tell you what to do,” he tells Molly Crane, his deputy chief. “It’s adorable that you think that,” she replies. And when all Paradise cops are banned from Daisy’s cafe because of Tate’s stupidity, Stone navigates treacherous territory while showing respect. This is Farnsworth’s first entry in the series created by Robert Parker, and fans will be pleased.
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593544761
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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