A charming and delightful cozy whodunit that will leave fans eager for the next installment.
Larkin Day returns in the second entry in Dieker’s mystery series, following Ode to Murder (2022).
After solving her first case, grad student Larkin is considering going into business as a private detective for hire and making Pratincola, Iowa—a Cedar Rapids suburb—her permanent home. Still living in her mother’s guest bedroom, she’s eager to make a fresh start in the new year. Her first case is the online “murder” of Bonnie Cooper, a fitness instructor and influencer who’s alive and well but whose social media, email, and cellphone accounts have been mysteriously erased from existence: “About as murdered as you can be without being dead,” as Bonnie describes it. Larkin’s job is to rescue Bonnie from this purgatory before she loses her sponsors, her subscribers, and her job at the local fitness center. Another person having career trouble is Larkin’s mother, Josephine Day, the dean at Howell College; she’s started receiving threatening messages in the form of yard signs after word gets around about her romantic relationship with police officer Claire. Larkin follows a social media trail to track down her culprits, but her personal life may be the most tangled case of all. Why is she putting off filing paperwork to be an officially licensed detective? Has she given up on working in theater? How’s her tentative relationship with music professor Ed going? Does her best friend Anni have a boyfriend? Overall, this is a charming mystery that offers readers a welcome twist on the typical cozy mystery plot. If readers haven’t read the first book, the author makes it as easy as possible for them to catch up by offering plentiful references to past events. Larkin’s journey will particularly speak to millennials who find themselves navigating the problems of the baby boomers and members of Gen Z in their lives while also trying to figure things out for themselves. The cast of secondary characters is entertaining and diverse, and the pacing is brisk. Clever humor and engaging relationships keep the tone light but satisfying throughout.
A charming and delightful cozy whodunit that will leave fans eager for the next installment.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781733691970
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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.
