Susan’s third metafictional whodunit is Horowitz’s most extended and intricately plotted yet—at least until next year.
Sharpen your mental pencils. Editor Susan Ryeland is taking on her most baffling mystery-within-a-mystery.
Now that Susan’s back from Crete and her latest romance, her boss at Causton Books, Michael Flynn, wants her to work with Eliot Crace, a failed mystery author who’s writing a sequel to the late Alan Conway’s tales of detective Atticus Pünd, which she knows far too much about already. As she reads Eliot’s first installment, Susan gradually becomes aware of something seasoned fans will have assumed all along—that the central mystery and the leading suspects in Pünd’s Last Case are all based on Eliot’s family, whose matriarch, world-famous children’s author Miriam Crace, died 20 years ago under circumstances that everyone involved insists weren’t at all suspicious. Teased by the first and simplest of three key anagrams Eliot has sneaked into his manuscript, Susan asks him about all those parallels, whose revelation would surely offend the rest of the family and very likely endanger the big-ticket deal that Eliot’s uncle, family estate manager Jonathan Crace, is negotiating over video rights to the Littles, Miriam’s adorable franchise characters. The mystery Eliot’s created around the fatal poisoning of Lady Margaret Chalfont broadly hints that Miriam was murdered as well. Susan’s attempt to sift through the parallels in the unfinished manuscript and figure out who killed Lady Margaret and what light that knowledge may shed on the death of Eliot’s grandmother is seriously upended when there’s a second murder and DI Ian Blakeney identifies Susan as his prime suspect. No wonder she vows at the fadeout to have nothing more to do with Atticus Pünd: “Never. Never again.” Uh-huh.
Susan’s third metafictional whodunit is Horowitz’s most extended and intricately plotted yet—at least until next year.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780063305700
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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