For those who value conflict for its own sake.
An internet romance goes horribly wrong.
You might think that the name of their coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds, was some kind of cruel joke rather than just a tired pun, since co-owners Maggie Thorsen and Sarah Kingston seem to have no shared concerns and spend all day every day sniping at one another. Having Christy Wrigley, the neat-freak piano teacher from across the street, fill in for their barista, Amy, who’s vacationing in Europe, does nothing to lower the emotional temperature. In fact, Christy could have proved a lightning rod for the bickering partners’ wrath, since she’s been dating Sarah’s step-cousin Ronny Eisvogel, currently in prison for trying to murder Maggie. But the two of them focus instead on Christy’s obsession with scrubbing the condiment cart and her annoying yellow rubber gloves. Things don’t get any better when, midscrub, Christy reveals she’s dumped Ronny for globe-trotting Barry Margraves. Since she met her new beloved on a dating site, he’s showered her with gifts, including a diamond tennis bracelet from Tiffany’s. Christy expects Barry to come see her any day now, engagement solitaire in hand, for their first in-person meeting. But his arrival is a huge letdown. First, Barry is squashed like a bug by a snowplow thoughtlessly left running outside the shop while its driver used the restroom. Second, Barry turns out to be married. When she comes to town to claim Barry’s flattened body, Helena Margraves bumps the conflict up yet another notch, claiming that Christy not only stole her man, but raided their joint bank account. The ingenious solution to the puzzle almost gets lost in the ensuing catfight
For those who value conflict for its own sake.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9057-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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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