An intriguing whodunit with memorable characters.
In Bacon’s novel, a 38-year-old New Yorker’s friend is murdered, and she soon discovers the many secrets she was keeping.
It’s 1987: Andy Warhol has recently died, the Iran-Contra Affair is on the news, and artist Seal Larson lies dead on Manhattan concrete. Emma Quinn, a history professor at Columbia University, had found a lot of common ground with Seal, her 30-something neighbor. Like Emma, the visual artist lived alone, and she shared Emma’s passion for art, music, and nightlife. The academic had thought that they were great friends and trusted each other, but upon Seal’s sudden, violent death, she learns her friend’s real name: Lucille Lawson. Emma’s determined to find justice for the friend she thought she knew—even if she must dive into years of secrets. Helping Emma investigate are her friend Bill Kidman, who’s with the CIA, and her boyfriend, Angus McLearan of British intelligence. Emma finds out Seal’s mother, an art collector, wasn’t living in England, nor was she estranged from her daughter; she actually died years ago from cancer and was originally from Tennessee. Seal—or rather, Lucille—has just one living relative, her Aunt Jenny. As Emma digs into Seal’s connection to Warhol, and her unexpected financial situation, she comes closer to finding a solution to the mystery. Bacon expertly interweaves details of the time period into the characters’ backstories, with Seal effectively narrating the story of her life in some chapters: “I wonder. Will anyone even care that I’m gone?” Emma’s chapters, told from the third-person perspective, feel as if one is observing a real person, and they effectively show her trying to find her friend’s killer while also dealing with the political atmosphere in which her friends live. The mystery is compelling and takes unexpected turns, and it’s supported by a steady pace and unique characters. Bacon also provides a satisfying ending—not only to the mystery, but also to a subplot involving Emma’s personal life.
An intriguing whodunit with memorable characters.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781733082761
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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