An enjoyable and suspenseful whodunit with a smart, captivating hero.
A trio of amateur sleuths must find a murderer in this first installment of a mystery series.
You would think Mia Murphy’s upbringing as a child con artist would prepare her for a life of crime, but that was not the case. Her husband, Stanley Herrera, was a big-time drug dealer until the FBI convinced Mia to gather evidence against him. Now, Stanley is put away and Mia needs to make a change. Determined to be her own woman, she skips the Witness Protection Program and heads to Maine with a cat named King Tut to reinvent herself as the owner of a dilapidated marina in the town of Bass Derby. Her reputation precedes her and the townies think Mia plans to deal dope. A resident tries to run Mia over with an SUV and the Welcome to Bass Derby sign (which the villagers take great pride in) is collateral damage, which angers almost everyone. But new friends Hattie Lawless and Lucy Grande are impressed by Mia’s racy past and the three bond over “scumbag” exes and their talent at finding comedy in just about every situation. The girl power they muster comes in handy when they discover Lucy’s abusive former boyfriend bludgeoned to death. Soon, Lucy becomes the main suspect. Who better to help investigate than the experienced (but reluctant) Mia? Rowe smoothly packs plenty of humor and lively plot details into this taut story with a vivid setting. The murder case and other messes must be cleaned up quickly—Bass Derby is in the running to be voted the Best Lake Town in Maine for the 12th year in a row. If the town of Bugscuffle across the lake takes the crown, Bass Derby will be up in arms. Mia proves to be a spirited, appealing, and loyal protagonist. She is harassed by the violent Derby Moose, a collection of nameless vigilantes who ride Jet Skis and wear moose costumes. The wacky outfits notwithstanding, they mean business and warn Mia to leave town. Though tempted by the desire to live a quiet life, Mia sticks to her guns and remains a true crime-solving pal in this engaging tale.
An enjoyable and suspenseful whodunit with a smart, captivating hero.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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