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MURDER BY THE CLOCK

A dazzlingly artificial but highly readable Golden Age gem squeezed into 12 hours, plus a bittersweet epilogue years later.

King’s third novel, originally published in 1929, shows a New York police lieutenant working the late shift to bring a killer to justice.

Despite the small number of suspects, there are lots of mysteries surrounding the death of Herbert Endicott. To begin with, is he really dead? His young wife calls the police when she becomes alarmed that he hasn’t returned from an errand after two hours. But when Lt. Valcour finds the missing man’s body hunched in the bottom of a cupboard, he’s so insistent that it remain undisturbed until Endicott is officially pronounced dead that he fails to notice—and keeps anyone else from noticing—that Endicott is still alive. Valcour’s plan to have family physician Sanford Worth keep Mrs. Endicott under sedation while Nurse Vickers or Nurse Murrow remains with Endicott until he comes around goes predictably awry, leaving Endicott really dead—no doubt about it this time—just as Thomas Hollander, the alleged best friend Valcour summoned so that Endicott could awaken to a friendly face, tries to stab him in the chest. Hollander is shot in the act by someone just outside the window, but who would be lurking there in the hours after midnight? If Endicott was being blackmailed, as the note his wife found reading “BY THURSDAY OR—” would seem to suggest, wouldn’t his blackmailer have a stronger incentive to keep him alive than to kill such a promising cash cow? And why is Mrs. Endicott so unconcerned about Marge Myles, her husband’s lover, that she keeps Marge’s name in her address book?

A dazzlingly artificial but highly readable Golden Age gem squeezed into 12 hours, plus a bittersweet epilogue years later.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025

ISBN: 9781613166222

Page Count: 288

Publisher: American Mystery Classics

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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BONDED IN DEATH

Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.

Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.

Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.

Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025

ISBN: 9781250370792

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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