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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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