Literary comfort food in the guise of a quirky whodunit.
Investigating a murder gives a lonely widow purpose.
Every day at 4:30 a.m., Vera Wong Zhuzhu, 60, wakes without an alarm; texts her son, Tilbert, to say he’s sleeping his life away; and takes a brisk walk around San Francisco’s Chinatown before returning to open her business, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse. (The name isn’t a typo but a calculated choice; “even white people” have heard of Vera Wang.) While fellow immigrants used to frequent the shop, now it has only one regular customer, and though Vera and her late husband paid off the building’s mortgage years ago and she lives upstairs, the utilities alone are sapping her savings. Solitude and irrelevance are wearing on Vera until she comes downstairs one morning to find a male stranger dead on the floor. Vera calls the police, who determine that the man—Marshall Chen, 29—likely broke in and then overdosed. Vera, however, believes it was homicide, seeing as Marshall died clutching a USB drive. Granted, the cops don’t know about the drive, as Vera pocketed it before picking up the phone, but that’s probably for the best; “nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands.” Gentle humor and abundant heart elevate Sutanto’s spirited mystery, which focuses primarily on the tender relationships that form between Vera and her four main suspects. A kaleidoscopic third-person narrative allows Sutanto to fully develop each character, investing readers in their fates. Vivid sensory descriptions of the custom teas Vera concocts and the elaborate feasts she prepares further heighten the feel-good appeal.
Literary comfort food in the guise of a quirky whodunit.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780593546178
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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