A brisk and appealingly twisty mystery, reliably anchored by the series’ resilient lead.
A decades-old murder case resurfaces with more questions than answers in Arnold’s mystery, the 13th entry in a long-running series.
This latest entry in the author’s Madison Knight series characteristically begins with a crime—in this case, it’s the horrific rape and murder of teenage Emily Kane at a high school senior-class beach party by someone she knew (“As her brain screamed for oxygen, the spinning in her head began to slow. This is how I die!”). Fast-forward 24 years to the newly discovered corpse of Kane’s former classmate, 41-year-old Dylan Graham, found in his home next to a handwritten suicide note, computer printouts about Kane’s murder, and an accusatory diary entry pointing to classmate Troy Matthews as the girl’s real killer. Veteran Braybury police detective Carson Snow reopens the case and apprehends Matthews—who is a fellow officer—on the day of his wedding to police detective Madison Knight. Knight is immediately spurred into action to both solve Emily’s murder and absolve her fiance. With his bail posted, Knight gets to work sifting through clues and crime-scene evidence while the novel fills in some critical backstory by revisiting the night in question and the hard-partying group of teenagers (who all believed that Richie Klein, the boy who was eventually convicted of Emily’s murder, was actually innocent). Klein’s recent release from jail could afford him the opportunity for revenge against his boyhood friend, Troy. As Troy’s sister Andrea (the local police chief) and Detective Snow desperately investigate the crime, Madison’s faith in her fiance’s innocence never wavers. Arnold’s grasp of police-procedural conventions is assured. The mystery opens with a murder, and all of the primary players immediately fall into position with a few hairpin turns, conveyed in short, crisply written chapters that lead to a satisfying resolution. While this installment can be read as a stand-alone entry, readers new to the Madison Knight mystery series may want to backtrack several books to become familiar with the recurring cast of characters. Arnold has mastered the recipe for an engrossing, rousing, and ultimately gratifying mystery, and this installment is no exception.
A brisk and appealingly twisty mystery, reliably anchored by the series’ resilient lead.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781998095032
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Hibbert & Stiles Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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