A clever, funny mystery peopled with captivating characters that enhance the story at every quirky turn.
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Osman follows The Thursday Murder Club (2020), his supremely entertaining debut, with an even better second installment.
Coopers Chase, an upscale retirement village in the British countryside, is home to the Thursday Murder Club, which consists of shrewd, deadly former spy Elizabeth Best, retired nurse Joyce Meadowcroft, psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif, political activist Ron Ritchie, and three honorary members, fixer Bogdan Jankowski, DCI Chris Hudson, and Police Constable Donna De Freitas. A letter from a dead man plunges Elizabeth and her friends into a dangerous case involving local crooks, the Mafia, and MI6. The letter is signed by Marcus Carmichael, whose corpse Elizabeth had seen pulled from the Thames years earlier, but it turns out to have been written by Elizabeth’s ex-husband, Douglas Middlemiss, who knew that name would get her attention. Douglas isn't dead, but he's still in a spot of trouble involving stolen diamonds and an angry go-between who holds valuable items for a variety of crooks. When a group of teenagers steal Ibrahim's phone and then kick him in the head after he falls down, the group plots revenge, little knowing that the two problems may soon become one. When Douglas and his handler, Poppy, are shot dead, the group must race MI6 and several vicious crooks to neutralize a number of killers and find the diamonds. Elizabeth, who knows so much about Douglas, is assigned to decode the clues he left behind, but each of her seemingly innocuous friends has skills that enhance the group’s ability to survive and place blame where it belongs while covering up a myriad of minor offenses.
A clever, funny mystery peopled with captivating characters that enhance the story at every quirky turn.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-98-488099-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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A vast Cold War space thriller from astronaut Hadfield.
Incorporating real-life characters and events, spanning decades and distances both terrestrial and translunar, this NASA-heavy thriller has everything, including perhaps a bit too many meticulously reported technical procedures. The story opens with not one but two aircraft episodes—a bird strike wrecks an F-4 Phantom and a Cessna 170B is taken out for a rhapsodic spin—then follows the developing career of Kaz Zemeckis, who, until the bird strike cost him an eye, had been a military astronaut with good prospects of going to the moon. Repurposed as a crew liaison for NASA, Zemeckis is involved in both the training for and the mission of Apollo 18. Hadfield's use of real people brings historical authenticity to the novel, and there are many tidbits of NASA lore that only an insider could provide, but the devotion to technical facts has some drawbacks. There are more moving parts to this novel than there are in a Saturn V, and Hadfield is careful to give each part a complete description: provenance, purpose, design, and in-use characteristics are all faithfully recorded. This makes the first part of the novel so technically focused that it seems the action will never get off the launchpad, though doubtless there are readers who will revel in these details. In the event, Apollo 18 is a complex mission. Initially charged with collecting geological samples and sabotaging the new Russian moon rover, the three astronauts are then told to sabotage the Russians' new spy satellite, which is thought to be unmanned but is not. The crisis created by this bungled attempt at space vandalism establishes the main narrative thread, with Zemeckis back at Mission Control in Houston struggling to keep the mission going. There is a murder and other deaths as well as injuries, vomiting, and space brawls, all reported in close detail. Though the climax is somewhat over-the-top, the basic bones of a good thriller are here even if the beginning is a slow burn.
Space nerds will geek out, and everyone else eventually gets a pretty good ride.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-31626-453-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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