Of all Carr’s many celebrated puzzles, this one most closely resembles a magic trick. Be prepared to be royally hoodwinked.
Seeing isn’t believing in this diabolically clever tale of poisoning first published in the U.S. as The Problem of the Green Capsule in 1939.
Weeks after someone in the village of Sodbury Cross has added strychnine to some chocolate creams in a sweet shop, killing one child and sickening several others, wealthy peach grower Marcus Chesney, convinced that eyewitnesses to anything are unreliable, stages a brief midnight scene designed both to present his theory of the poisoning and to pull the wool over the eyes of his own three witnesses: Marjorie Wills, his niece and unofficial ward; George Harding, the suitor she met during a recent trip abroad; and Gilbert Ingram, a retired professor of psychology. Before any of them has a chance to start writing down answers to the 10 apparently innocent questions Marcus has asked them about the theater piece they’ve just seen, Marcus keels over, poisoned by a cyanide-filled capsule his unidentified co-star popped into his mouth just before the lights came up. Marcus’ brother, Dr. Joe Chesney, returns from a late-night house call just in time to pronounce him dead; Wilbur Emmet, the manager of Marcus’ nurseries and the man most likely to have been Marcus’ accomplice and assassin, lies unconscious in the yard outside. The three witnesses contradict each other about absolutely everything, but the biggest surprise awaits the moment that the ever-reliable Dr. Gideon Fell, on whom baffled DI Andrew Elliot calls for help, shows the witnesses the film that Marcus had asked George to make of what turned out to be his very last moments.
Of all Carr’s many celebrated puzzles, this one most closely resembles a magic trick. Be prepared to be royally hoodwinked.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781464216329
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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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