A briskly readable, if slightly uneven, whodunit to while away a long afternoon.
Hanafee offers readers two mysteries to solve in this mystery series entry set on an idyllic Florida island: one from 20 years ago and the other close to the present day.
It’s 2019, and jaded veteran reporter Wes Avery has come to South Florida to leave the rat race up north.His friend Leslie Elliott—the protagonist of Hanafee’s previous novel, Scavenger Tides (2020)—is an aspiring mystery author who tends to either find trouble or stir it up. Twenty years ago, 22-year-old Toby Mason shot himself in the head at a drunken party, but many townspeople don’t think it was the suicide that the shoddy police investigation concluded it was. Toby’s father has been trying to drink himself to death ever since, which gets Wes interested in the case. Meanwhile, two other characters from the previous book show up: One is Frank Johnson, charter fisherman, DEA informant, and Leslie’s boyfriend; the other is Jamie Thompson, drug runner. Johnson and Thompson have a rendezvous on the beach on a dark night and both wind up shot dead. Who may have hastened Toby’s death that night, and who killed Frank and Jamie? Hanafee moves things along in fine fashion, peppering the proceedings with good and unsettling lines: “I’ve discovered that on this island truth and fiction often walk the beach hand-in-hand,” Leslie says at one point. Many leads develop but few pan out; Wes manages to interview several witnesses to Toby’s death, but with mixed results, and Toby’s father is severely beaten. Some parts of the story seem forced, as when Leslie and Frank’s ex-wife, Janis, get drunk, bury the hatchet, and improbably become enthusiastic sleuthing partners. Everything finally works out, of course, although the resolution to Frank and Jamie’s story is a bit more surprising than Toby’s. The denouement may be a bit too sentimental for some readers, but not all.
A briskly readable, if slightly uneven, whodunit to while away a long afternoon.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781667820422
Page Count: 258
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
