A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.
A prima ballerina investigates a homicide by dangerous stage prop in this rollicking mystery.
Robbins’ third On Pointe yarn finds Leah Siderova, the aging, sore-kneed ballerina of New York City’s American Ballet Company, enmeshed in yet another murder at the world’s deadliest dance troupe. The victim this time is artist and set designer Maurice Kaminsky, who built a rickety escalator for Leah to ascend when she dances the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. Maurice turns up mangled to death in the contraption’s gears. Suspects include Maurice’s husband, Brett, the company’s domineering choreographer; Tex, Leah’s dance partner, who may have been sleeping with the victim; a filmmaker who was shooting a documentary about the designer; Maurice’s art dealer, who stands to gain from the inflation of his paintings’ prices; and Victor Roth, a wolfishly charming lawyer. Assisting Leah is her posse of amateur detectives, including her crime writer mother, Barbara; her Aunt Rachel; the dancer’s cagey Russian ballet coach, Madame Maksimova; and Olga Shevchenko, Madame’s friend, who may be in the Russian mob. Along the way, Leah juggles relationships with hunky emergency room doctor Zach Mitchell and Jonah Sobol, the sexy but poker-faced police detective assigned to the case. When another body plummets from the sky, Leah fears that she might be the killer’s next target. Robbins, a former ballerina, steeps the novel in the glamorous grunge of the dance world as Leah nurses her aching body, obsessively counts the calories in every spinach leaf, dodges a too-familiar donor, and fences with her (metaphorically) back-stabbing rival, Kerry Blair. The author stocks the story with sharply etched characters and deploys vast schools of red herring to keep readers guessing as Leah and her pals ponder every possible perpetrator. Robbins renders this well-observed zoo in lively prose that weaves between catty humor—“When I dance Juliet’s death scene, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. If you get top billing, there won’t be a dry eye at the box office”—and bloody mayhem. (“His head lay at an odd angle, and he had four severe cuts, one on his face and three across his chest. Glitter from the set was mixed in with the blood.”) The result is a suspenseful romp with loads of atmosphere.
A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9781685121969
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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