Thomas’ virtuosity shows in this fast-paced and intricate yet emotionally moving mystery.
Moving between Austin, Singapore, and Madeira, Thomas’ first contemporary mystery delivers an irresistible ensemble and a raft of surprises as crime-solving librarians solve double murder mysteries while guarding their own secrets.
Building on her bestselling and critically acclaimed Lady Sherlock historical mystery series and historical romances including My Beautiful Enemy (2014), Thomas conquers the art of genre-blending contemporary crime fiction. When her husband disappears under a cloud of major financial malfeasance, Hazel Lee trades her Singapore penthouse for the peace and comfort of life as a library worker in Austin, Texas. With warm memories and her beloved grandmother close by, her childhood hometown seemed like the perfect refuge. But just days after she starts her new job, two patrons are found dead in suspicious circumstances and suspicion weighs heavy on her and her colleagues, every one of whom has something to hide. Sophie, the uber-professional head librarian, is a single mother who worries that a criminal investigation could break her vulnerable family apart. The second in charge, Jonathan, is a lovelorn gay military veteran who’s carrying some heavy scars. Astrid fears that her strange secrets and lies and intimate connections to one victim could land her in the detectives’ crosshairs. And Hazel is weary, having already fled the stench of scandal and police suspicion in one country. Soon the core four are bonding together to solve the mystery before one of them ends up in prison (or worse). Thomas weaves the multicultural ensemble’s stories together seamlessly with vivid and frequently beautiful writing. The single drawback is the occasional reliance on coincidence. Between the intrigue flowing from complex cryptocurrency and other gray-market sleights of hand and a kind of serial serendipity regarding the personal connections among the central cast, plot contrivances sometimes border on convoluted. But the setting and the relationship scenes—whether focused on the friendships among the librarians or between the librarians and their family members or romantic interests—are finely observed every time. This knockout mystery mixes the camaraderie of The Thursday Murder Club with the chic family and romantic drama of Crazy Rich Asians.
Thomas’ virtuosity shows in this fast-paced and intricate yet emotionally moving mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780593640456
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
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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