A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.
In Selbo’s third Dee Rommel mystery, grisly murders reveal a sex-trafficking ring in placid Portland, Maine.
The third installment of Selbo’s Dee Rommel series finds the 20-something private eye and former Portland police officer, who lost half of her left leg in the line of duty, investigating the murder of Hannah Wall, a driver for local ride-hailing app WheelieMaine. The young woman was found with her throat cut in her car, which crashed and burned. Dee is drawn into the case when her assistant, Abshir Jama, asks her help for his friend Yuusuf Farax, a high school senior and fellow Somali immigrant, who witnessed the crash and then had his backpack stolen by a possible perp at the scene. The next morning, he found the word “Silence” spray-painted on his house. Dee calls on her cyber-sleuth friend, Jade, for help; she recognizes Hannah as a volunteer at a teen crisis hotline who was a victim of sex-trafficking. Jade connects Dee with the organization’s director, Nancy Camsion; however, when Dee goes to meet her, she finds Nancy’s apartment door bashed in and Nancy dead in the bathroom with a slashed throat. Yuusuf reluctantly reveals that he knew Hannah personally, and that she’d formed a support group for teens who’d participated in parties where they were offered drugs and money to have sex with anonymous strangers. Along the way, Dee compares notes with Portland police detective and longtime flame Robbie Donato, who urges her to steer clear of Hannah’s case.
Over the course of this mystery, Selbo paints an atmospheric portrait of a lived-in Portland that’s quaint on the outside but rotten on the inside. She populates it with decent people and sharp operators, hardworking immigrants, and local lowlifes redolent of “the smell of beer, pot and unwashed armpits.” Her writing is shrewd, canny, and subtle, and it’s always alive to small gradations of behavior that have serious import: “Part of my job is recognizing lies. There are lots of tells: Slight hesitation. A swallowing of words. False bravado. Not engaging in eye contact. A change in vocal tone. That’s what I’ve just heard.” In Selbo’s evocative, punchy prose, Dee comes across as a compelling and complex hero—one who’s painfully aware of her vulnerabilities but accepts them with hardboiled aplomb: “It’s the slash on her throat…that brings up the bile. My diaphragm convulses, I frantically push myself up—fast—and turn to the wall just as the yellow-ish waste projectiles from my throat and hits the tile. Shit. Now I’ve contaminated the scene.” Dee also ably discovers more puzzle pieces and persons of interest as the investigation proceeds, including Tip Flack, a squirrelly hacker and WheelieMaine’s CEO; Steph Byrne, her high school classmate who runs a high-fashion resale shop that employs troubled teens; and Steph’s slick developer boyfriend, Xavier Toomey, who immediately hits on Dee. Along the way, readers will root for her as she heads gamely toward the truth.
A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781950627707
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.
A 16-year-old savant uses his Groundhog Day gift to solve his grandfather’s murder.
Nishizawa’s compulsively readable puzzle opens with the discovery of the victim, patriarch Reijiro Fuchigami, sprawled on a futon in the attic of his elegant mansion, where his family has gathered for a consequential announcement about his estate. The weapon seems to be a copper vase lying nearby. Given this setup, the novel might have proceeded as a traditional whodunit but for two delightful features. The first is the ebullient narration of Fuchigami’s youngest grandson, Hisataro, thrust into the role of an investigator with more dedication than finesse. The second is Nishizawa’s clever premise: The 16-year-old Hisataro has lived ever since birth with a condition that occasionally has him falling into a time loop that he calls "the Trap," replaying the same 24 hours of his life exactly nine times before moving on. And, of course, the murder takes place on the first day of one of these loops. Can he solve the murder before the cycle is played out? His initial strategies—never leaving his grandfather’s side, focusing on specific suspects, hiding in order to observe them all—fall frustratingly short. Hisataro’s comical anxiety rises with every failed attempt to identify the culprit. It’s only when he steps back and examines all the evidence that he discovers the solution. First published in 1995, this is the first of Nishizawa’s novels to be translated into English. As for Hisataro, he ultimately concludes that his condition is not a burden but a gift: “Time’s spiral never ends.”
A fresh and clever whodunit with an engaging twist.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781805335436
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
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
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