A great mystery with genuine characters and a satisfying ending.
In Somers’ mystery, when a journalist’s best friend goes missing, she’ll stop at nothing to find her.
Eleanor Wooley, a crime reporter for the Gold Strike Tribune(a newspaper in rural California) is assigned to write about the murder of Ruben Beaumont. At first, it seems the murder could be linked to Ruben’s crimes of thievery and blackmail, but Eleanor discovers the gay man’s killing may have been a hate crime committed by local bigot Wade Stockton. Eleanor’s attention is divided by the disappearance of her best friend, Rette Kenny, who may be lost in the Sierra Nevada. As she tries to do everything in her power to help in the search for her friend, Eleanor discovers another crime near the location where Rette disappeared: the theft of 11 horses. The horses were taken from Bear Clover Inn, not far from where Rette’s abandoned truck is soon found. Eleanor heads up to Bear Clover Inn, learns more about the stolen horses, and then sets out to join the search for Rette. But it’s stymied when dogs are able to track Rette’s scent down a ledge and into a river but no further. However, there is new hope for answers when Eleanor learns Wade Stockton may be involved in Rette’s disappearance—and in illegal horse trading. Somers spins an engaging mystery that captures readers’ attention from the first page and keeps up the momentum as Eleanor makes smart decisions to find the truth. The protagonist’s dedication to justice—not just for her friend, but for anyone who has been wronged (including the majestic horses that have been stolen)—makes her a worthy heroine. The rural setting feels grounded and real in Somers’ descriptions: “On her right under the cape of night, sandpaper hills scraped the black horizon and the Truckee River spangled with moonlight.” The web of blackmail, thievery, and murder is made entertaining by the twists and turns of the story; at the same time, the author maintains the verisimilitude of the darker moments.
A great mystery with genuine characters and a satisfying ending.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 978-1960573865
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Sibylline Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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