Dedicated fans of the franchise may enjoy watching Meier’s heroine negotiate the distance between public and private life.
A small-town reporter faces big changes, both personal and professional.
After coming home to Maine from her father-in-law’s funeral in Florida, Lucy Stone runs slap into a major kerfuffle at the Pennysaver, Tinker Cove’s premier (and, let’s face it, only) print news source. At first, it looks as if Lucy’s about to lose her star reporting gig because publisher Ted Stillings will sell the paper. But no—what he’s actually done is buy an adjacent town’s local weekly, the Gilead Gabber, planning to expand their merged newsrooms and start an online edition while maintaining each paper’s print masthead. He’s even hired Rob Callahan away from the Cleveland Plain Dealer to give his new venture some big-city cachet. Not surprisingly, Rob turns out to be a bossy know-it-all who edits mistakes into Lucy’s city budget article while lounging in Ted’s office. But she’s not about to allow pushy Rob to steal her prize story: the battle for the post of Grand Marshal of the Gilead Hibernian Knights Society’s annual Irish Parade. While she tussles to retain her turf at the office, there’s a new threat at home. Her husband, Bill, has received a letter from a younger woman claiming to be his half sister, complete with a DNA test. Instead of being horrified to discover that her late husband may have had a child with another woman during their marriage, Edna Stone is thrilled to meet this new member of her family. Given all this domestic strife, Lucy’s nonplussed when Tinker’s Cove latest fatality is none of the players mentioned above but a corrections officer suspected of harassing female inmates.
Dedicated fans of the franchise may enjoy watching Meier’s heroine negotiate the distance between public and private life.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1039-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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