Ça c’est bon!
Woolworth’s crime novel serves up a 200-year-old mystery alongside one from the present.
As this debut novel—the first in a planned series about New Orleans antique dealer Bruneau “Bru” Abellard—begins, Bru gets a call from Detective Thibodaux “Bo” Duplessis of the New Orleans Police Department. Bo is Bru’s childhood pal and a “friendly antagonist.” A lifelong bachelor and history lover, Bru helps Bo, who’s married to “saucy eyeful” Angeline, investigate the thefts of valuable items. This time, it’s a grave that’s been robbed, and it’s unclear what was taken. The grave belongs to actress Jane Placide, who died at age 31 of Yellow Fever in 1835. Bo asks his friend to research Jane, hoping to determine what could have been buried with her that was worth breaking into her tomb to steal two centuries later. A leading actress of her time, Jane had won the admiration of theatergoers and the hearts of potential suiters. There are indications that one such admirer could have been Jean Lafitte—pirate, smuggler, slave trader, and a hero of the Battle of New Orleans. Bru, aided by his former good friend, one-night lover, and historian Sallie Mae Maguire, tries to tie Lafitte to Jane. Running parallel to these efforts is the search for the thieves and whatever was stolen. In this mystery, modern-day grave robbers and long-ago star-crossed lovers are skillfully intertwined. The historical backdrop is fascinating, and the descriptions of contemporary New Orleans are on the mark (Woolworth namechecks famous NOLA restaurants such as Manale’s and Commander’s Palace). Evocative descriptions of the city and its surroundings, including the “vast network of sinuous waterways carving their way through swaying oyster grass,” weave throughout the book. There is humor (“she long ago mastered the art of speaking authoritatively on topics about which she knows little”) as well as sweetness (Bo’s kids get a kick out of Bru using “his highly trained nose” to guess what’s for dinner). Woolworth’s novel is a well-crafted mystery that is beautifully written, educational, and all-around entertaining.
Ça c’est bon!Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781685126988
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
