Ça c’est bon!
Woolworth’s crime novel serves up a 200-year-old mystery alongside one from the present.
As this debut novel—the first in a planned series about New Orleans antique dealer Bruneau “Bru” Abellard—begins, Bru gets a call from Detective Thibodaux “Bo” Duplessis of the New Orleans Police Department. Bo is Bru’s childhood pal and a “friendly antagonist.” A lifelong bachelor and history lover, Bru helps Bo, who’s married to “saucy eyeful” Angeline, investigate the thefts of valuable items. This time, it’s a grave that’s been robbed, and it’s unclear what was taken. The grave belongs to actress Jane Placide, who died at age 31 of Yellow Fever in 1835. Bo asks his friend to research Jane, hoping to determine what could have been buried with her that was worth breaking into her tomb to steal two centuries later. A leading actress of her time, Jane had won the admiration of theatergoers and the hearts of potential suiters. There are indications that one such admirer could have been Jean Lafitte—pirate, smuggler, slave trader, and a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Bru, aided by his former good friend, one-night lover, and historian Sallie Mae Maguire, tries to tie Lafitte to Jane. Running parallel to these efforts is the search for the thieves and whatever was stolen. In this mystery, modern-day grave robbers and long-ago star-crossed lovers are skillfully intertwined. The historical backdrop is fascinating, and the descriptions of contemporary New Orleans are on the mark (Woolworth namechecks famous NOLA restaurants such as Manale’s and Commander’s Palace). Evocative descriptions of the city and its surroundings, including the “vast network of sinuous waterways carving their way through swaying oyster grass,” weave throughout the book. There is humor (“she long ago mastered the art of speaking authoritatively on topics about which she knows little”) as well as sweetness (Bo’s kids get a kick out of Bru using “his highly trained nose” to guess what’s for dinner). Woolworth’s novel is a well-crafted mystery that is beautifully written, educational, and all-around entertaining.
Ça c’est bon!Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781685126988
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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