A richly drawn, multipronged mystery set during a winter week in Maine.
Selbo’s tenacious Portland detective untangles a knot of related mysteries in this crime novel, the fourth in a series.
Dee Rommel is Portland, Maine’s newest minted private investigator. The former police officer with a distinctive prosthetic just passed the license exam, making her an even more valuable member of the team at G&Z Investigations. And just in time: The mysteries are piling up both at work and at home. For one, her mother Gayle, a top administrator at a prestigious cancer research institute, is being cyberbullied by one of her subordinates, but for some reason, she refuses to make a report. Then there’s Billy Payer, a murderer who once kidnapped Dee and is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence. He wants to meet, claiming he might have some information about an outstanding case. On top of that, while breaking up a domestic dispute in a restaurant parking lot on the way back from Boston, Dee has her luggage stolen by a violent woman who may be off her meds. Dee manages to get the bag back a few days later—only to discover that the thief, Gilli Wanz, has been brutally murdered. It turns out the unstable Gilli is a member of a farming family with deep ties to the area—and the owner of a block of dilapidated rental units in the midst of rapidly gentrifying Portland. Finally, Dee’s boss, detective Gordy Greer, has asked her to look into the death of a friend of his: local environmental activist Frank Croake, whose demise was initially ruled a suicide, though Gordy suspects foul play. Is there a connection between Gilli’s death and Frank’s? Dee’s work on both cases will force her to collaborate with her ex-boyfriend, current Portland police detective Robbie Donato, stirring up unwanted feelings along the way. Dee will need to keep her wits if she wants to solve the cases without losing any more limbs—and all during her birthday week, no less!
Selbo’s muscular prose captures both the particularities of the setting—snowy farms, locals suspicious of outsiders, seafood platters covered in Captain Mowatt’s Canceaux Sauce—and the guarded personality of her narrator. “I toss these observations around in my mind too often,” Dee acknowledges after a litany of shower-time thoughts about the nature of humanity and detective work; “nearly always as conversations between me and me because they take place when I’m home and alone.” Even so, there are satisfying moments of connection, or near connection, thanks to the large cast of characters, most of whom come with established histories. The author manages to deploy three books’ worth of backstory in a way that deepens this novel and helps the reader understand the way Dee operates. There is a vulnerability to the investigator—seen both in her romantic life and in her quest for a suitable prosthetic with which to run the Boston Marathon—rarely encountered in detective novels. Fans of the series will undoubtedly enjoy this volume, while new readers will be drawn in by the many intersecting plotlines and chilly, lived-in atmosphere.
A richly drawn, multipronged mystery set during a winter week in Maine.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781950627769
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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