An engagingly witty whodunit brimming with inventive twists and turns.
In Stagner’s mystery novel, a pair of retired sisters find a dead body on their property and become the prime suspects in a murder investigation.
Sisters Claire Browning and Avery Halverson decide to retire from their stressful jobs as legal assistants to a quiet home in rural East Texas nestled within a gated community called Rancho Exotica. Their bucolic tranquility is shattered when the book’s titular “venue” of vultures leads them to a dead body in a densely wooded section of their property. The deceased turns out to be a neighbor, Thorne Mondae, who was clearly murdered—he was found with a hunting arrow lodged in his heart. Because Claire recently had an angry confrontation with him (she yelled at him for trespassing on her property while hunting), she becomes a person of interest in his murder investigation. She’s so fretful she’ll be arrested that she withholds from the police a video her trail camera took of the killer—a “shadowy figure” neither of the sisters can identify—since it captures Claire as well, placing her at the scene of the crime. Claire and Avery join forces with Jay Vidocq, the dreamy head of security at Rancho Exotica and a former Dallas homicide detective. As the investigation deepens, the list of suspects grows—Thorne turns out to have been an unsavory man with a dark past—and the relationship between Avery and Jay turns romantic. Much of this crime drama is deeply formulaic and melodramatic; here, Avery explains her turn as an amateur sleuth: “When Thorne Mondae was murdered in our forest and we became suspects, our world turned upside down. We need to restore that world to its rightful position. That’s why I want so much to discover who killed Mr. Mondae.” But this delightfully cozy detective story, which is as humorous as it is intelligently conceived, does have a lightsome companionability to it. Readers who enjoy the work of Agatha Christie are sure to like this novel as well—it’s fun and largely undemanding entertainment.
An engagingly witty whodunit brimming with inventive twists and turns.Pub Date: June 6, 2024
ISBN: 9798350947991
Page Count: 270
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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