An enjoyable jigsaw puzzle in the Holmes tradition, with gothic thrills and a dash of romance.
The world’s most famous detective must outwit her nemesis in Victorian Cornwall.
Thomas' series continues with the life of Charlotte Holmes, the woman detective masquerading as her fictitious brother, Sherlock, shortly after the events of Murder on Cold Street (2020). While Charlotte; her lover, Lord Ingram; her companion, Mrs. Watson; and her sister, Olivia, are hoping they haven’t riled Moriarty, the hope is soon dashed. The feared criminal mastermind, calling himself Mr. Baxter, wants Charlotte to take on a case involving his wayward daughter, who has secreted herself at a religious retreat in Cornwall. But is that all he has in mind? Left no real choice, Charlotte & Co. begin their investigations into Miss Baxter as well as into Olivia’s sweetheart, Mr. Marbleton, whom Moriarty has coerced back into his web. Tense and atmospherically rich, particularly in the Cornwall chapters, the novel is interspersed with brief scenes of Charlotte and Ingram’s new intimacy, including some chuckle-inducing letters. Thomas counts on readers being familiar with the way Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Holmes’ confrontation with Moriarty in "The Final Problem," but she provides a new (female solidarity) twist to get to that point rather than keeping us guessing about how she's going to adapt the famous ending. It’s an interesting application of the romance-genre structure, in which the predictable climax is less important than the journey toward it—something Thomas knows well as a romance author—but the way she sets up the twist and the ending by switching the point of view to a minor character is a bit clunky. Charlotte herself appears less like the neurodiverse character she's been established to be in previous novels, but her love for food and her loose allegiance to social mores and role-playing are still charming.
An enjoyable jigsaw puzzle in the Holmes tradition, with gothic thrills and a dash of romance.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593200-58-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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