An entertaining whodunit about running on empty.
In Breen’s debut mystery, an unsolved college-town murder gets a fresh look from an unlikely investigator.
It’s 1998 in Madison, Wisconsin—two years after college student and cross-country scholarship runner Andie Sheridan disappeared during a team outing only to be found days later in a shallow grave. Seamus O’Neill, a local rock musician who was never in it for the money (a good thing, because it never came), now works in a noninvestigative capacity for the Ryder Detective Agency, completing background checks and troubleshooting computer issues. When someone who knew Andie offers to hire the agency to find the killer that the cops couldn’t, O’Neill gets involved in the investigation. When he’s not on the case, he plays accordion and guitar in his shabby efficiency apartment, drinks, and woos women, who find him quite attractive. However, the heavy-drinking O’Neill knows that any woman who falls for him will leave after she realizes that he enjoys having a bottle more than having a girlfriend. However, the Sheridan case gives O’Neill a new focus. As a former runner, he relies on his knowledge of the sport and his creative instincts to determine how Andie could have disappeared midrun, why she was buried near the course but not close to where she was last seen, and how suspects’ alibis may not be as airtight as they seem. Mystery fans will be attracted to the puzzle of what appears to be an unsolvable murder. O’Neill is an intriguing antihero, aware of his foibles but unwilling to let go of them. Breen’s depiction of college-town life is convincing. Repetition does stumble in, particularly in descriptions of Andie’s final run. There are some fresh turns of phrase, as when someone says that Andie would hang with a pack of girls while at a bar in order to “dust guys away.” Discussion of the Madison and Chicago music scenes add dimension; the author also gets bonus points for a Steve Earle mention.
An entertaining whodunit about running on empty.Pub Date: July 15, 2022
ISBN: 9798986208305
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Dutch Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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