A serpentine, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing right to the final pages.
An interior designer becomes embroiled in the murder of her former best friend in Carlisle’s mystery novel.
The story begins with the murder of Elaine Reid by means of a six-inch butcher’s blade. Inebriated and confused, Reid’s former longtime best friend and interior design business partner, Catheryn “Cat” Clark, is found at the scene, covered in blood. Detectives zero in on the rock-solid motive: Elaine’s vicious betrayal of Cat involved an illicit affair with Cat’s husband, Tim. Elaine brought hotel receipts to Catheryn’s house on the night of the murder to arrogantly throw the evidence in Cat’s face. The burning question of Cat’s guilt looms over the remainder of the novel as Elaine’s ghost appears in Cat’s jail cell to tell her she isn’t responsible, despite her faulty memory and the circumstances of the killing damning her in the eyes of the law. Flashbacks detail Cat and Elaine’s friendship throughout college at North Carolina’s Green Valley University. Their group included the pushy, manipulative Elaine and her boyfriend, Evan, Cat and her partner, Tim, and Mia Davis, whose life was cut short by a shocking suicide. Questions linger about Mia’s demise even decades later—local police detective Rachel McGowen, who was also Mia’s classmate, reexamines the cold case, unconvinced it was a suicide as the jailed Cat recalls “how our entire group dynamic seemed to shift” after the tragedy. The scenes involving the longtime group of friends demonstrate Carlisle’s grasp of character development, which is key to keeping this mystery simmering. Complex and satisfying, the narrative features plenty of crisp detective spadework, unanswered questions, interpersonal melodrama, more dead bodies, and enough surprises to keep even seasoned mystery fans on their toes. As this is Carlisle’s first entry in a three-book series, readers will hotly anticipate where the author takes her characters next.
A serpentine, suspenseful mystery that will keep readers guessing right to the final pages.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9798864108949
Page Count: 505
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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