A clever series kickoff featuring a sleuth who opens the often misunderstood world of autism to a wider audience.
A 24-year-old autistic woman displays a remarkable talent for detection in this novel by an autistic author.
Ada Latia built a cosmetic company that her ex-husband, the ironically named Rex Friendly, stole when he divorced her “eight months, two weeks, and three days ago,” marrying her best friend two months later. Now, forwarding her an article about the death of an autistic schoolgirl, Rex insults her by saying that autistic people aren’t really human. Despite her pain, Ada is drawn into the story by the accompanying picture showing a body that seems to be posed. The girl’s death has been called an accident, but Ada is sure that it’s murder. Her efforts to get the case reopened are fruitless until she leaves a message on the FBI public line. Then she gets an unexpected call from her schoolmate Henry Bloodstone, an FBI agent, who remembers both her quirks and her prodigious talents. Conversations with neurotypical people are always difficult for Ada, but she agrees to work as Henry’s unofficial consultant, and they travel to the victim’s school in Idaho to investigate. The child who died, Ella Kimball, came from a wealthy family, and her high-priced tuition was helping to support the school. At the time of her death, she was with one of the two autistic sons of the school director, Soledad Sanchez, who’s willing to let her son take the blame for an accidental death in order to save the school. Meeting Ella’s parents, especially her furious mother, is so traumatic for Ada that she goes into a meltdown. Interviewing everyone who works at the remote school, she and Henry find that Ellie was an extremely difficult child. But who wanted her dead? Despite the difficulty of the investigation for Ada, it will lead to life-changing events.
A clever series kickoff featuring a sleuth who opens the often misunderstood world of autism to a wider audience.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781448316434
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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