This leisurely but absorbing murder mystery boasts indelible detectives and a particularly nasty villain.
This ninth installment of Cooper’s thriller series follows a sleuthing couple trying to unmask a knife-wielding killer.
Dr. Brad Parker, director of the Maine Translational Research Institute, is supposed to meet an “expert in running clinical trials” for breakfast. But cops discover this expert, Dr. Eric Salton, dead from a brutal stabbing in his hotel room after receiving an award at a Boston cancer research conference. Brad and his fiancée, Lt. Karen Richmond, who heads a major crimes unit, get details from a friend and local homicide detective. It turns out Salton was known for sexually harassing women and had the power to ruin careers (“Salton made a practice of hitting on women who worked for him and had no hesitation in using his power over them”). This produces quite a few suspects; the police, per security footage, know the murderer is female. Then a second victim is killed in the same fashion, another doctor Brad had known. Was this man guilty of the same transgressions as Salton? Or is there another motive that Brad and Karen have yet to connect to anyone? In either case, the killer is far from finished. Cooper’s slow-burn mystery is at its best in chapters conveyed from the killer’s perspective, which give readers only a bit more insight than the sleuths possess. This use of POV reveals a frighteningly methodical culprit who grows increasingly blood-chilling (“she drove home, stopping at a dumpster along the way to dispose of. But she kept her knife. She wasn’t finished yet”). Though Brad dreams up a clever scheme to identify the killer, the story culminates in a largely predictable final act. Still, the recurring leads are immensely likable, especially when they’re deciphering clues together (“Karen gave me a half-smile. ‘Not bad, we’ll make a detective out of you yet’”).
This leisurely but absorbing murder mystery boasts indelible detectives and a particularly nasty villain.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798992426113
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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