A strong start to a new mystery series with a fine sense of place.
In the first novel in Searle’s planned trilogy, two brothers—a cop and a journalist—investigate two suspicious deaths in 1984 rural Minnesota.
Boston Meade itches to return to Chicago as editor-in-chief of the major newspaper American Outlook. The divorced journalist has lately served as interim chief of small-town Minnesota newspaper the Alton County Statesman since his father, the paper’s owner and editor, died. While pursuing a bootlegging story, intern Peder Norgaard discovers the bones of the long-missing Minneapolis detective Max Kaplan. Peder digs into the mystery, and soon, his own body is found at the bottom of a ravine, and his notes have gone missing. The same day, World War II veteran Eliot Ferrall is found dead in his truck, a possible suicide—but there are no fingerprints on the gun and no blood in the cab. Suspicious as the deaths are, county sheriff Jack Meade finds no hard evidence to declare them murders. Jack, who’s biracial, was an 8-year-old orphan when Boston’s white family adopted him; he and Boston have been best friends ever since, but now they’re divided by Jack’s handling of the investigations. Boston’s hired a new editor for the paper—Ginger O’Meara, whom he dated in high school—but vows to stick around until there’s closure on Peder’s death. Meanwhile, Jack faces a charged reelection battle against white Dwayne Jager, whose slogan is “He’s one of us!” Searle delivers a page-turning mystery that tackles a host of issues, including racism, immigration, family conflicts, and job stress, and even includes a bit of romance. The author is a Minnesotan himself who was raised on a farm, and he ably manages to capture the state’s landscape (“his gaze took in the fencerows that divided southeastern Minnesota into fields of corn and soybeans, oats and pastures interspersed with groves and farmsteads”) and the pleasures of small-town life in a relatively low-tech era. The book is populated by several believable and flawed characters, and the potential suspects are likely to keep readers guessing.
A strong start to a new mystery series with a fine sense of place.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781959770442
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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