A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.
A widowed brain surgeon investigates a murder in Smallwood’s mystery novel, a prequel to her detective series.
Santa Christina is an idyllic California town shaded by the lemonadeberry–covered slopes of Mount Reposo. It’s a quiet place, where the most fearsome predator is the occasional coyote. Dr. Ogy Bradley is shocked when he returns from a conference to discover that his neighbor and close friend, noted hillside gardener Babby Blenheim, has been killed in a mudslide. (It appears the sprinklers in her orchid garden malfunctioned.) Ogy, a widowed brain surgeon, can’t believe that Babby’s death was an accident. The person tasked with investigating the death is Ogy’s friend from the diving club, Detective Tor Abelove of the Santa Christina Police Department. Tor has always been a surfer first and a cop second, but he’s still a pretty good detective. He figures out that Babby was bludgeoned to death prior to the mudslide, but there’s no clear motive and no obvious suspects. Who would benefit from the orchid lady’s death? A local burglar? Her adopted niece and nephew, who would inherit her money? A rival gardener? A local politician with an acrimonious history? As Ogy and Tor look into the case, they quickly discover the ground beneath their feet is just as unstable as Babby’s hillside orchid field. Smallwood is a prose stylist, and her serpentine, often surprising sentences give the novel its playful, puzzling atmosphere: “Luis Paredes’ tactic of protecting his best second-hand shirt by sitting out a paintball war inside a cardboard carton had two major consequences—the attempted murder of his brother, and the apprehension of a burglar who for months had eluded police.” She hides the ball by nearly overwhelming readers with character detail and backstory, but the maximalism is part of the fun. New readers will be glad to know that previous Cop & Doc mysteries are waiting to be read.
A charming and immersive mystery with a lot of personality.Pub Date: July 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798990455207
Page Count: 342
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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