A clever, empathetic, and totally believable heroine sets this fine cozy above the competition.
Love in the time of indecision.
Samantha Barnes, who writes the “Cape Cod Foodie” column for the local newspaper, hopes to renovate the house she inherited from her aunt Ida with the proceeds of a surprisingly valuable antique clock she found in the attic. Searching for the perfect blueberry buckle for her Fourth of July picnic, she discovers it while she and her friends are eating at Clara’s Place, a legendary Provincetown restaurant founded by Clara Foster but now owned by her protégé, Ed Captiva, a cousin of Sam’s love, harbormaster Jason Captiva. When Clara agrees to do a video showing Sam how to make the delectable buckle, it leads Sam into her third murder investigation. Clara welcomes Sam into her home, where they’re going to make the video; the house is modest from the outside but has a prime water view and a beautifully renovated interior. Sam is bowled over by the kitchen, of course, but it's Clara’s collection of rare cookbooks that takes her breath away. As she’s showing Sam around, Clara opens up with some personal revelations about her late wife, Kit, an accomplished painter whose work in the style of Edward Hopper is hard to tell from an original. That night, a house fire kills Clara and destroys her collection of cookbooks. When Sam meets with Detective Vivian Peters at Clara’s house, she immediately becomes suspicious because Clara would never have left the burner on after cooking some bacon in the middle of the night, which is what the police think started the fire. In the absence of Jason, who’s away on a 12-week training course in California, Sam relies on her friends to help her investigate. When Jason flies in to support her, he drops a bombshell: He’s been offered a job in California.
A clever, empathetic, and totally believable heroine sets this fine cozy above the competition.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-19918-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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