Persistent fans will find a pretty good mystery lurking under the ghostly shenanigans.
The ghost sleuths at the Haunted Guesthouse try their hands at solving several new murders.
Alison Kerby’s Victorian guesthouse on the Jersey Shore comes complete with two resident ghosts that she, her mother, and her daughter can see, though her second husband can’t. Instead of being freaked out, Alison has made a good thing out of her haunted house by hosting regular haunted vacations for seniors. The spirits are those of private eye Paul Harrison and flamboyant interior designer and computer maven Maxie Malone, who continue to hang obligingly around the house putting on a show for the guests now that Alison has helped solve their murders (Spouse on Haunted Hill, 2016). But then Paul decides he wants to see the world and returns only when his older brother, snarky lawyer Richard Harrison, is murdered. The ghostly Richard is more interested in proving his client Cassidy Van Doren innocent of drowning her stepfather, Keith Barent Johnson, than in finding the miscreant who smashed in his own head. Alison, who has a PI license of her own, has been doing legwork for Maxie and Paul, since ghosts can’t converse with people who don’t know they exist. When Alison starts asking uncomfortable questions of Johnson’s family, including his two children from a former marriage, and Cassidy’s mother, who evidently enjoyed her position as the wife of a wealthy man, strange events at the guesthouse suggest that a new ghost has arrived. Information has been erased from files Richard compiled, and Cassidy’s mother tries to bribe Alison to quit the case. Now that Richard’s murder has put Cassidy’s trial on hold, the sleuths have time to come up with new evidence to prove someone else did the deed. But it may be a tough sell when even Cassidy’s mother insists she’s guilty.
Persistent fans will find a pretty good mystery lurking under the ghostly shenanigans.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68331-450-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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