The anemic mystery is consistently outshined by the full-throated celebration of Caribbean American pride.
Brooklyn’s annual Caribbean American Heritage Festival is disrupted by murder and a host of lesser irregularities.
Lyndsay Murray, of the Spice Isle Bakery, wonders whether her cousin Manson Bain, an audio engineer at Caribbean Tunes, is really just friends with Camille Abbey, lead singer of DragonFlyZ, or whether there’s something more to the relationship. Before she and her appealingly nosy relatives can find out once and for all, the question is rendered moot when Camille is killed in a tumble down a flight of steps at the height of what ought to be a joyous occasion. Or was she pushed, since it beggars the imagination to think that she fell backwards? When NYPD Homicide Det. Bryce Jackson ignores Manny’s pleas for an investigation, Manny asks Lyndsay to lean on him. Lyndsay has two clear advantages: She’s already been dubbed “the Grenadian Nancy Drew” after clearing up two earlier cases that implicated her mother and herself, and Bryce Jackson is definitely sweet on her. But he continues to drag his feet at every step, and Lyndsay ends up taking the lead in identifying suspects, uncovering evidence, and confronting the killer she is the first to finger. Along the way, Matthews reminds readers of the Caribbean backgrounds of entertainers and public figures from Alexander Hamilton to Eric Holder. At the long-awaited fade-out, Lyndsay announces, “No more dead bodies for me.” Let’s see about that.
The anemic mystery is consistently outshined by the full-throated celebration of Caribbean American pride.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250839084
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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.
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