The well-wrought plots and densely imagined worlds make this the most distinguished mystery collection so far this year.
Fourteen stories, most dating from 1996 to 2018, about Chicago shamus V.I. Warshawski, her friends and family, and a remarkably diverse group of other people.
Five of the seven stories about Warshawski are first-rate; only “Wildcat,” which takes the young Victoria’s family through the disruption of Martin Luther King’s 1966 visit to Chicago, and “Is It Justice?” a wish-fulfillment sequel to Critical Mass (2013) in which somebody shoots a newly exonerated killer as he descends the courthouse steps, play better as politics than fiction. In the others, V.I. seeks out a student she humiliated at a high school Q&A; finds a contemporary case of plagiarism beneath a decade-old murder; hunts down her client’s father only to be told that he’s not her client’s father; turns down a bodyguard gig on behalf of a wealthy author who begins trash-talking her every chance she gets; and, in the brand-new title story, goes to bat for her dislikable ex-neighbor’s kid brother when he’s arrested for murder. What’s even more impressive is the variety of the other seven stories. Paretsky effortlessly masters Dr. Watson’s voice in an adventure that shows Sherlock Holmes bested by an upstart American and sends Carroll John Daly’s pioneering hard-boiled dick Race Williams to the 1933 Century of Progress Fair. The deftly plotted “Acid Test” shows an apostle of nonviolence arrested for bombing a neighbor’s scientific institute. The charming “Miss Bianca” turns on a 10-year-old girl’s solicitude for a lab mouse. The dystopian fantasy “Safety First” and “Trial by Fire,” a pendant to Bleeding Kansas (2007), show off Paretsky’s willingness to take risks. And “Heartbreak House,” in which a romance writer’s editor recommends that she consult a psychotherapist, who promptly gets killed, ends the collection on a wryly amused note.
The well-wrought plots and densely imagined worlds make this the most distinguished mystery collection so far this year.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291554-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
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