A fiendishly inventive serving of humble pie, or Christmas pudding, for puzzle-solvers who think they’re clever.
Belgium’s enduring gift to the annals of detection travels to Norfolk to solve a murder case that grows more and more vexing.
Arnold Laurier, the math teacher who’s inherited Frellingsloe House, is dying. But before he goes, his wife, Vivienne, has two wishes she conveys to her best friend, Cynthia Catchpool: She’d like Poirot to visit Arnold, who’s long idolized him, for Christmas week 1931, and she’d like him to figure out who killed inoffensive Stanley Niven, a patient in St. Walstan’s Cottage Hospital, before Arnold takes up residence in the hospital room next door. Poirot agrees to make the trip, and his amanuensis, Scotland Yard Inspector Edward Catchpool, is so devoted to him that he tags along even though it means spending a week with his long-estranged mother, by far the most amusing character here. The timing of Niven’s fatal bashing identifies the principal suspects as Arnold’s closest relatives: his wife; his sons, Douglas and Jonathan; and their wives, Madeline and Janet. The main reason that Arnold doesn’t want Poirot to solve the mystery, however, is not that he’s unwilling to implicate his loved ones but that he wants the glory of solving it himself, even if the cost is his own life. Hannah paints such a suffocating picture of Christmas at Frellingsloe House that Poirot’s inquiries among the staff at St. Walstan’s come as a relief. When the inevitable second murder takes place on Poirot’s watch, he applies the principle of “now that it’s there” that Catchpool has proposed in a quite different context to unpack the well-nigh undetectable motive for both murders.
A fiendishly inventive serving of humble pie, or Christmas pudding, for puzzle-solvers who think they’re clever.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9780062991638
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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