A touch of romance and magic combine with detection in this charming cozy.
As usual, the tarot cards are correct in their warning of danger from a mysterious stranger.
Hope Bailey and her sister, Summer, are helping their grandmother Olivia Bailey, who’s joining her boyfriend, Morris Henshaw, for a weekend trip to his 50-year high school reunion. Each of them has packed enough for an around-the-world cruise. Olivia is going to miss the Halloween party the family usually holds at their mystic shop in Asheville, North Carolina, but which this year, as a favor to their friend Megan, Hope and Summer are giving as a joint party with her boyfriend's restaurant, the Green Goat, which has been having financial problems. As Olivia gets ready to leave, she's uneasy because Hope’s only tarot reading for the day turned up The Magician, a rarely seen card. Just as Olivia’s heading to the airport, two camper vans arrive, one carrying Lucas Deering, a friend from the sisters’ teen years. Morris’ son, Dylan, a down-to-earth doctor, doesn’t like Lucas flirting with Hope. He likes it even less when he learns that Lucas is a conspiracy theorist chasing down creatures like the chupacabra and sasquatch. The other van contains three people: quiet Erik, Collin, and his wildly jealous girlfriend, Amber, whose dish-throwing fight brings the arrival of Summer’s boyfriend, Nate Phillips, a police detective whose work could well clash with the family’s magical skills. All these conflicts pale in comparison to Hope and Dylan’s unplanned meeting in the Green Goat’s basement with Megan and her boyfriend, Daniel Drexler, who discover Collin's body in a pool of blood. Who most wanted Collin dead: his jealous girlfriend, a fellow conspiracy theorist, or someone who didn’t want him investing in the Green Goat? The motley crew must use all their skills to find his killer.
A touch of romance and magic combine with detection in this charming cozy.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781448310562
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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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