True crime for Lin-Manuel Miranda fans.
Willig explores a real-life unsolved murder case from early U.S. history.
December 1799: Vivacious Elma Sands leaves her cousin Caty Ring’s boardinghouse for a secret assignation; her body is later found in a well. Suspicion immediately falls on Levi Weeks, another boarder, who’s been romantically linked to Elma for several months, and the young man is quickly brought up on charges. His wealthy brother, Ezra, enlists the help of lawyers Aaron Burr and Brockholst Livingston, exhorting them only to ensure that Levi is acquitted. Enter Alexander Hamilton. Struggling under the weight of recent political disappointments and unable to stop himself from meddling in Burr’s affairs, Hamilton joins the defense team. To his mind, it’s not enough to sow doubt about Levi’s guilt—he must ensure that the young man’s reputation survives the ravages of trial. Hamilton discovers that there is at least one person with a motive for murdering Elma: her cousin Caty’s Quaker husband, Elias Ring. Willig follows the investigation and its immediate effects on Caty and her sister, Hope. As Hamilton uncovers domestic secrets, his counterpart for the prosecution, Cadwallader Colden, is rather buffoonishly preparing his case by racing sleds and racking up an incredible number of possible witnesses. The novel culminates in Levi’s trial, where the lawyers’ battling egos threaten to undo their good work. Willig has clearly done her research; the world of the fledgling 19th century leaps from the page in sensory detail, emphasizing the casual suffering of women, in particular, and the ever present threat of violence—and childbirth. Hamilton and Burr are not reduced to caricature, but held up with a loving eye on the pride and intransigence that would ultimately lead to their legendary downfalls. Above all, we witness the birth of a young nation’s legal system, and are left, perhaps, feeling better about the course of justice in 1800 than in 2025.
True crime for Lin-Manuel Miranda fans.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780063433496
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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