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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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