A brisk and satisfactory sequel that earns extra credit for its well-read sleuth and other memorable characters.
A high school English teacher puts her strained marriage—and her life—at risk when she helps investigate the murder of a country club member in Robbins’ mystery, one in a series.
Liz Hopewell reluctantly arrives at the Meadowfields Country Club for a golf lesson, a belated and unwanted birthday gift from her husband. The unathletic and underdressed outsider Liz is on her way to the driving range when she overhears an argument between formerly married couple Elliot and Melinda Tumbleson: “I’ll see you dead before I let you get away with this,” Melinda threatens. Later, Liz comes across Elliot’s body in the club’s bushes. He has been clobbered with a golf club—one belonging to Liz. What’s an amateur sleuth to do but investigate? Liz reunites with detective Tom Harriman (from Robbins’ 2017 Lesson Plan for Murder); her husband is not thrilled by the prospect. (“This is a disaster,” he complains.) Taking cues from classic literature, Liz zeroes in on two obvious suspects: Elliot’s first wife, Melinda, and younger new wife, Sonya. “Anyone who was married to him had to have wanted to kill him,” Liz reasons, tongue-in-cheek. These events occur on the anniversary of Liz’s mother’s death, and Liz’s sister Susan, her partner in solving crimes, finds evidence that their mother’s death was not accidental. Both cases will teach Liz that when it comes to murder, she has a lot to learn. Liz Hopewell is a refreshing figure on the sleuthing scene; dispensing with the wisecracks used by her more hard-boiled brethren, she cites literary quotes that encapsulate the situation. A former teacher herself, Robbins populates her story with indelible characters such as Melinda, who uses her position as school-board president to hassle, bully, and blackmail Liz to do right by her spoiled, coddled son. The mystery surrounding her mother’s death further fleshes out Liz’s family backstory, and her growing estrangement from her husband points to a new chapter in her life.
A brisk and satisfactory sequel that earns extra credit for its well-read sleuth and other memorable characters.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781685127121
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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