A celebratory display of the many things an accomplished veteran can do with the short mystery.
Eighteen stories, 15 of them reprints from 1973-2020, from the prolific British writer equally distinguished by his inventiveness and his polished craftsmanship.
The oldest tale, “The Bathroom,” is a fictionalization of the career of serial wife-killer George Joseph Smith most noteworthy for the anecdote it inspires in Lovesey’s introduction; its true-crime counterpart, “A Tale of Three Tubs,” is more beguiling and compelling. The historical interest is also the strongest element in “The Deadliest Tale of All,” in which Edgar Allan Poe meets the man who plans to write his obituary. And the trimmings in “A Three Pie Problem,” in which Superintendent Peter Diamond eludes his visiting relatives by investigating the poisoning of a retired accountant at his own Christmas party, shine more brightly than its payoff. Mostly, though, the stories are a demonstration of how many things Lovesey can do well. A burglar who wins a contest that sends him to Marrakesh in “Lady Luck” suffers an exquisitely well-calibrated payback. The veteran romance novelist tempted from her midlist purgatory to ghostwrite a roman à clef about a thinly disguised celebrity in “Ghosted” smells a rat just in time. In “The Homicidal Hat,” another mystery writer gets unexpected help from her crabby husband designing the winning entry in the cozy mystery conference Malice Domestic’s contest for most creative hat. “Formidophobia” traces the roots of the narrator’s fear of scarecrows to a dread secret that conceals still darker secrets. The hanging of a theatrical troupe’s leading lady introduces a surprisingly orthodox whodunit in “Gaslighting.” And the ending of the title story, in which the impending loss of their monastery leads to the poisoning of two monks, is more heartwarming than surprising.
A celebratory display of the many things an accomplished veteran can do with the short mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-641-29361-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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