Suffering succotash! The feisty heroine Myers (Classic at Bay, 2016, etc.) places at the center of this new series has an...
A chef suddenly finds herself acting as a detective in Jazz Age England.
Nell Drury is that rare bird, a female chef. Trained in London by Escoffier, she works in Kent at stately Wychbourne Court, home to Lord and Lady Ansley and three of their children, Lord Richard, Lady Helen, and the bookish Lady Sophy. Also in residence are the dowager Lady Ansley, Lord Ansley’s sister Lady Clarice, and of course a full complement of servants. As she prepares a dinner for the Ansley’s guests followed by a costume ball and a ghost hunt led by Lady Clarice, who’s devoted to the family spirits, Nell is happily surprised to learn that her former beau Guy Ellimore is the bandleader for the dance. But she’s less happy when Lady Clarice asks her to lead the second group of ghost hunters. Her distaste turns to horror when she discovers the body of Charles Parkyn-Wright, a friend of Richard’s who set him on edge by dancing most of the night with Richard’s love interest, the beautiful but unpleasant Honourable Elise Harlington. Annoyed herself when DI Alexander Melbray of Scotland Yard mostly ignores her ideas, Nell teams up with guest and neighbor Arthur Fontenoy, who offers to play Watson to her Holmes. Since Lady Ansley also wants her to unmask the killer, she agrees. In addition to making enemies because of his dealings with women, Charlie, as it turns out, has used his connections to deal drugs. A second death makes Nell and Melbray redouble their efforts to find the killer.
Suffering succotash! The feisty heroine Myers (Classic at Bay, 2016, etc.) places at the center of this new series has an affinity for food-based alliteration and a knack for discovering secrets. Like so many other cozies harkening back to the past, it supplies plenty of suspects and a surprise ending.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8685-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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