Keep your friends close and these four aunties closer.
Another wild wedding day befalls the Chan family in Sutanto’s wacky sequel to Dial A for Aunties (2021).
Almost a year after Meddy Chan and her four aunties covered up an accidental murder, Meddy can’t wait to have a fresh start by marrying her dream guy, Nathan, at Oxford's Christ Church College. He’s the “perfect specimen of a man” according to her Ma, yet even with their wedding day rapidly approaching, Meddy can’t help but feel like their union is too good to be true. To make matters worse, her “batty” aunties have yet to meet Nathan’s prim-and-proper English parents, and they’ve started using British slang like “dog’s bollocks” in hopes of impressing Chris and Annie. To further appease Meddy’s wedding jitters, her aunties hire the Tanuwijayas, an Indonesian family of wedding vendors who handle flowers, hair, makeup, and photography—score! Meddy finds a kindred spirit in photographer Staphanie, and they become fast friends after bonding over misspelled names and pepper spray. Their friendship proves to be short-lived, however, when Meddy overhears a phone conversation in which Staphanie agrees to take someone out…and not as a plus one. It turns out Staph and her family are in the organized crime business, and their next target happens to be a guest at the Chan wedding. When Staphanie threatens to expose last year’s accident to the police, Meddy and her aunties embark on a madcap, Sopranos-style series of hijinks in order to stop the Tanuwijayas’ plan in its tracks. With plenty of weed-spiked champagne and gags made of pantyhose, these four aunties make it known: Don’t mess with the Chan family. Sutanto’s sequel doubles the trouble for Meddy and Co., but it is not without some frustrating moments (Meddy is basically MIA for her entire wedding). Despite the continual shenanigans, you can't help but get a kick out of the aunties' outrageous stunts and their even bigger hearts.
Keep your friends close and these four aunties closer.Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44076-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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