The tight-wound puzzle is half the pleasure Bannalec offers. The other half is the gorgeous Breton sea.
Murder comes to Concarneau.
Commissaire Georges Dupin has much on his mind. Renovations have made conditions in the police station intolerable. So although Kadeg, his other inspector, is on paternity leave, Dupin allows Inspector Riwal to take his family to Belle-Île for a few days. Even his assistant, Nolwenn, gets fed up with the dust and dirt and heads for the hills, quite literally, on a bike tour of the oldest pubs in Brittany. Dupin himself is ready to take time off to spend Pentecost with his companion Claire’s parents. But these plans get tossed out the window—again, quite literally—when he’s called to investigate the death of Dr. Pierre Chaboseau, whose wife found him dead in the courtyard after he fell from their apartment on the upper floor of the same building housing the Amiral, Dupin’s favorite restaurant. The outrage of a crime committed not only in his adopted province of Brittany, but in Concarneau, the very town he chose as his home after having been banished from Paris, is too much. Claire will have to show her parents the town on her own. Dupin scares up Rosa Le Menn and Iris Nevou, two young policewomen, to pitch in for his missing inspectors, puts in a frantic call to Nolwenn, and sets out to find the general practitioner’s killer. Since Chaboseau was a sharp businessman with a finger in many pies, there are plenty of suspects to choose from. But as the web grows more extensive and diffuse, it’s a tip from the late Georges Simenon, whose novel The Yellow Dog was set in Concarneau, that leads the latter-day Georges to solve a crime with deep Breton roots.
The tight-wound puzzle is half the pleasure Bannalec offers. The other half is the gorgeous Breton sea.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9781250840974
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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