An appealingly cozy whodunit in a well-observed setting.
In this second installment of a mystery series, a professor searches for answers when a body is found in her ransacked house.
At Rutherford College in Coowahchobee, Florida, history professor Ariadne Caulfield and English professor Judith Sheridan, both in their 50s, are fast friends. As Braendlin described in their first adventure, Love and Death in Venice (2016), the two became entangled in sinister criminal doings last summer, when Judith met her partner, Suzanne Hanks. (Ariadne was widowed a few years earlier.) This September, the friends are co-teaching a women’s literature course. One evening, Ariadne returns home to a shocking discovery. In the classic mystery novel tradition, there’s a man’s body in the study. It’s Randall Medina, an English department adjunct, but what on earth is he doing there? The room has been tossed, suggesting he was robbing the house, though Ariadne has no valuables and can’t seem to find anything missing. Investigating the crime is the attractively rugged Sheriff Beaufort “Beau” Hammell, 62. As events unfold, he questions students and teachers, developing a mutual attraction with Ariadne. Meanwhile, dark plans are hatched by a woman with a grudge against one student. Retired English professor Braendlin shows her familiarity with academia, such as its gossip, tenure-seeking professors, and underpaid adjuncts. She also vividly evokes the story’s Northern Florida setting, from bathtub-warm ocean water to pulled-pork sandwiches. A few references are dated (for example, an answering machine), and dialogue can be overcooked: “I wouldn’t mind having a tryst...but not out here in this oppressive insect-infested jungle.” That said, the novel offers a nicely balanced plot, including deft character sketches, a blossoming romance for Ariadne with Beau, and a few surprises, including late-breaking drama arising from cleverly sown seeds.
An appealingly cozy whodunit in a well-observed setting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64066-098-4
Page Count: 230
Publisher: The Ardent Writer Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
