A plethora of suspects, likable characters, adorable cats—what more could you want?
Who knew a blind date could lead to murder?
Ashley Branson has recently opened a cat yoga studio, A Purrfect Pose, featuring lots of adoptable cats. She takes a night off when her best friend, Sierra Wahl, sets her up on a blind dinner date with Grady Richards. Arriving at the restaurant, she runs into yoga student George Wilkins and his cousin, Edward, before she meets Grady, who’s so late that she fears he’s not coming. When he finally shows, he’s confronted by a tipsy and furious Edward. To top it off, Grady goes to the restroom and never returns, sticking Ash with the bill. At least things are going better at the studio—except for Ash’s next-door neighbor, a dog groomer who’s constantly complaining about the cats. The morning after the terrible date, Ash’s friend Olivia Chase, a police officer, arrives to escort her to see Chief Dan Higgins, who asks a lot of questions about her evening before telling her that Grady’s been found dead. Ash is already stressed out from dealing with her controlling mother, Cecilia, who wanted her to continue working for the family design business; her brother Hunter, who’s having a baby with Chief Higgins’ daughter; her father, who’s now married to her best friend from high school; and the fact that she, Hunter, and their sister, Alexi, are all being followed by the same man. When Ash sees Grady alive and well in a bar, her curiosity gets the best of her, and despite warnings from Chief Higgins, she and her pals turn up clues that connect some unlikely people.
A plethora of suspects, likable characters, adorable cats—what more could you want?Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781496747389
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.
A retired hit man’s wish to impress his new love leads him back into a thicket of crime and corruption.
During the dinner date they’re finally going out on, Chicago area therapist Gwendolyn Lord shares with English professor Cameron Winter a story she’s just heard from forensic psychologist Livy Swain, an old school friend, of an impossible crime. Owen McKay, arrested six months ago for killing his wife and son and crying, “It’s still there! Still there!,” was shot to death with a nail gun inside his closely watched prison cell. Though his initial reaction is idle curiosity, Winter resolves to show off his prowess to Gwendolyn by solving the mystery. Dr. Billy Whitefield, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem on McKay, shares with Winter a monstrous revelation that he’s been blackmailed into concealing: He removed a spidery attachment from McKay’s brain whose existence was deleted from the official report. After a friend at his college links the implant to Thaumatix—a company whose motto is “We’re in the business of miracles”—Winter learns of another case that sounds eerily similar: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Connecticut high school student by a previously inoffensive carpenter who’s killed before Winter can question him. Surrounded by assassins and amoral corporate overlords, Winter leans more and more into his relationship with Gwendolyn, though the person he most wants to talk to is the Recruiter, the nameless boss he trusted to make life-or-death decisions when he worked as a contract killer. Miraculously, the Recruiter, who’s vanished, returns to Winter’s life. But what if he can’t be trusted any more than everyone else?
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166864
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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