A fun and captivating historical noir.
In this novel, a private investigator stumbles on a large conspiracy when a real estate developer starts snatching up land in 1950s San Francisco.
In 1957, Katsuhiro “Kats” Takemoto is watching Alfred Hitchcock direct the film Vertigo. Kats was brought in to help James Stewart prepare for the role of a San Francisco private detective and then was retained by the studio (“Stewart needed security and a driver while he was in town and said he wanted Kats”). After the movie wraps, Kats goes back to his job as a private eye, taking the case of a man named Anton Vello, who is trying to save his family business from unscrupulous developers. The goal of the developers seems to be to buy land for a new baseball stadium for the Giants. But as Kats investigates, he quickly sees that something fishy is going on with the people who are trying to drive out Anton’s family and others in the mostly immigrant community. A secretary named Molly Hayes, who works for the developers, finds their actions morally dubious and agrees to help Kats. Kats is juggling a few other cases, and his path keeps crossing with Molly’s, leading them to grow closer. Also in the mix is Kats’ friend Shig Murao, who manages the City Lights bookstore. As Kats continues to investigate, it becomes clear that there’s a much bigger conspiracy at work, and the culprits aren’t above using violence to get their way. Kageyama’s novel offers a bracing look at postwar San Francisco. Kats is still dealing with the fallout of World War II, during which his family surrendered much of its property and he served in the Army. Many of the characters are first-generation Americans, and a recurring theme focuses on immigrant identities. The story, which blends historical fiction and noir, is well researched, with a lot of intriguing period details about San Francisco. Readers who adore immersive settings will find plenty to love here. There are also some striking cameos, from luminaries like Stewart and Allen Ginsberg to such lesser-known figures as blues singer Gladys Bentley.
A fun and captivating historical noir.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-940300-63-4
Page Count: 364
Publisher: St. Petersburg Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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