An often humorous mystery replete with questionable decisions, fortunate coincidences, and opportunities for redemption.
A father and daughter team up to solve a murder.
With limited success as an adult actor, former child star Jarrod Jarvis has pursued writing and is currently rehearsing his new play, an Agatha Christie–inspired mystery. Following the untimely death of his husband, Charlie, a police detective who succumbed to cancer, Jarrod was left to raise their daughter, Olivia, whose choice of a criminal justice major in college was a tribute to Charlie. Jarrod’s savvy friend Kitty Reynolds, who encouraged him to pursue writing and directing—and who happens to be a former first lady of the United States—wants to set him up with her new Secret Service bodyguard, the exceptionally attractive Jim Stratton. Liv’s currently dating Zel Cameron, a documentary film student who urges her to find and meet her surrogate mother. Meanwhile, Liv’s best friend, Maude, develops romantic feelings for Zel’s charming assistant. Liv grows more concerned about the financial motives behind Zel’s actions when he reveals that he’s located the surrogate, Candy Lithwick. Candy is agreeable enough, but one of her two children harbors suspicions that Liv wants her mother’s property, and the other needs Jarrod’s assistance in promoting his career. Charlie’s brother Brody, a semifamous professional wrestler, arrives seeking refuge in Jarrod’s casita. When Zel fails to show up for a dinner where he was supposed to meet Jarrod, an annoyed Liv visits his studio and discovers his lifeless body. Unsatisfied with the police investigation, Jarrod, who’s dabbled in detection, embarks with Brody and Liv on his own investigation and learns that Zel’s habit of plagiarism made him widely disliked at school.
An often humorous mystery replete with questionable decisions, fortunate coincidences, and opportunities for redemption.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781496738929
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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