An entertaining beach read with the potential for a sequel.
A spunky new stringer for a local North Carolina newspaper scores a major scoop in Thomas’ novel.
It is the Spring of 1971 and Amanda Blackstone, freshly graduated from Chapel Hill, is at her fourth job interview. Her confidence waning, she enters the office of Allen Parks, executive editor of the Coastal Herald, the daily newspaper for the small town of Compton, North Carolina. Her enthusiasm (“Well, I’ll give you this: you’ve got…uh, spirit, shall we say”) convinces Parks to give her a chance, a one-month probationary period as a stringer. Her first assignment: a fluff piece on the opening of a new grocery store. Accompanied by staff photographer Josh Bennington, Amanda is conducting her initial interviews when she notices an unmarked delivery truck removing rather than delivering boxes of produce. She convinces Josh to help her track down what is happening (it’s a drug operation), and so begin her adventures as a new reporter. But a much bigger story is on the horizon: When she is paired with staff writer Patrick Maguire to cover a county zoning hearing, she learns about Jack Lockwood and the real estate empire he has been building in Compton, leading to an investigative journey that will test her mettle and put her life at risk. Thomas provides enough action and plot twists (including family secrets, a suicide that may be a murder, and blackmail) to keep readers guessing and turning the pages, even though the final reveal is not a total surprise. Adding to the dramatic stakes are a budding romance between Amanda and Patrick and one character’s unexpected and tragic death. The narrative develops at a steady pace, and, with the benefit of Thomas’ professional experience as a publisher’s assistant, it provides an intriguing insider’s view of the operation of a small-town daily. Amanda is an engagingly strong female protagonist, feisty, relentlessly inquisitive, and fearless—some might say reckless.
An entertaining beach read with the potential for a sequel.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798822919686
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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