A confident, meticulously detailed mystery that would have made Shirley’s pipe-smoking idol proud.
A female sleuth and her assistant investigate a case involving a vicious dog attack in the debut novel from de Helen, whose previous works include short stories and plays.
A wealthy matriarch is killed—a heart attack after being assailed by apparently wild pit bulls. Her daughter believes it was murder, and she enlists the help of Shirley Combs, a financial portfolio manager who works as a detective on the side. Shirley, aided by Dr. Mary Watson, compiles a list of suspects: Those who stood to inherit her mother’s fortune, those affected by her plan to save the forests, a jealous lover, her strangely absent son. Or was it simply a tragic accident? “We’ll see,” says the gumshoe. Readers may be tempted to roll their eyes at the discernible correlation between the author’s novel and a certain famous detective’s (say Shirley’s full name really fast) case involving a similar canine-inspired murder. But mystery fans need not fret: These obvious allusions are trampled by the custom-designed Converse All Stars adorning the feet of a self-possessed and exemplary investigator. Mary, who—like the other Watson—provides narration and acts as a sounding board, describes Shirley as eccentric, but Shirley has a style all her own: She has a lab in her apartment, drives a Mercedes, and interviews people for both the gathering of clues and to gain prospective clients for her other job. One of the novel’s most striking traits is its portrayal of events from Mary’s perspective. If she wasn’t at the scene, she recounts events as told by Shirley. Mary’s secondhand accounts are more precise than her firsthand experiences—surmising that someone flinched and then changing her mind; literally jotting down “mmm” as a response, unsure if it was meant as yes or no. The grandest example of how Mary’s point of view affects the story is Shirley’s opening a line of questioning by asking the breed of a dog and then explaining that she was inquiring for Mary’s benefit; Mary, for her part, writes down the unfamiliar breed name phonetically and is so upset by Shirley’s sarcasm that she misses the entire conversation. The author provides the prerequisite features for classic mystery fans: a roster of suspects to keep readers guessing, assembling those suspects for the big reveal, allowing plenty of time for periodically reviewing the case, and of course, a magnifying glass.
A confident, meticulously detailed mystery that would have made Shirley’s pipe-smoking idol proud.Pub Date: April 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475129212
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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