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Review

Knife Skills for Beginners

by Brian Kenney

Cooking as entertainment, from reality shows to competitions to documentaries, couldn’t be more popular, and Murrin’s decision to set Knife Skills in the heart of a London cooking school is a smart one. Located in an old mansion in the super-posh Belgravia neighborhood, the school—which is residential—offers week-long classes for small groups of a dozen or so. The students, a bit of an odd crew, are super excited at meeting their instructor Christian Wager—he’s sort of a Gordon Ramsay type. When Christian shows up, one arm in a cast, and announces that he’s passing the class on to his good buddy Paul Delamare, the class groans in disappointment. Paul isn’t a celebrity like Christian, but he’s a darn good chef, and slowly the class warms up to him. Until there’s a murder as gruesome as you can imagine (hint: cleaver) and the class rather ghoulishly wants to continue the course—corpse be damned!—and with Paul the number-one suspect. From here, the book spirals out—there are red herrings galore, and nearly everyone seems to be a suspect at one point or another. Lots of fun to be had, especially with the characters Murrin creates.

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Review

The Resurrectionist

by Willy Williams

As the third son of a modestly landed family, James Willoughby has been told from an early age that he must earn a living befitting his station. Being of “a diminutive stature,” James decides the military is not for him. Nor is the Church of England an appealing option. Despite his family’s opposition, the young man abandons his clerical studies at Oxford and heads north to Edinburgh to become a physician. It’s 1828, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Scottish city is a “shining beacon of medical discovery.” But James quickly learns that if he wants to develop anatomical knowledge and surgical skills, he must join one of the private schools in Surgeon’s Square. Unable to afford the additional tuition, James makes a bargain with his professor’s secretary and dissectionist, the charismatic Aneurin “Nye” MacKinnon, to serve as a lookout to prevent possible grave robbing in the Greyfriars kirkyard (graveyard) beneath James’s chamber window. The naive student soon discovers that he is aiding a gang of body snatchers who steal fresh corpses from churchyards for anatomical study at the medical schools. Nye explains to a horrified James that he is a Resurrectionist: “Our motivation is not in the value of the bodies we steal, but in the second life we give them.” Bedazzled by Nye’s scientific passion (and his dark sexiness), James plunges into this illicit, gritty underworld. However, their rivals in the body-snatching game, the sinister Burke and Hare, will murder anyone to corner the corpse market. Mixing a macabre gothic mystery with a sensitive coming-of-age tale and a touching queer romance, Dunlap has written an exciting, well-researched debut historical adventure. Bizarre, authentic details, like the mortsafes, or cages, that grieving families installed to protect the graves of their loved ones, make for an unforgettable read.

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Review

Bad Liar

by Henrietta Thornton

I could have sworn that Tami Hoag had an Oprah Book Club pick years ago. That’s what spurred me to pick this up–I usually like Oprah’s picks, and if one of those authors has something new, I’m intrigued. It seems I was wrong, but the happy mistake led me to meet the steadfast Sheriff’s Office Detective Annie Broussard and watch her doggedly investigate three maybe-interlinked crimes in her small south Louisiana town. Local fishermen find a body in the water, its face shot off. There are soon two possibilities as to whom it could be, as two local men are found to be missing. One, Marc Mercier, is a former high-school football star in a town where the sport is everything, who’s returned from time away to his doting mother’s embrace. His Yankee wife is none too happy to be stuck in “Ass Crack, Louisiana,” and might be getting “comforted” by a suave coworker. Also nowhere to be found is Robbie Fontenot, a doctor’s son who has gone off the rails due to Oxycontin addiction. His own doting mother believes he’s on the mend and is desperate for someone to care about where he could be, but not having much luck till she storms the sheriff’s office and meets Annie. Rural loyalties, mothers’ love, sibling rivalries, a hefty dose of Cajun language and slang (glossary provided), and swampy humidity steaming off the pages combine to make a memorable and affecting read. Oprah, take note!

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Review

Rough Pages

by Brian Kenney

The third volume in Rosen’s Evander Mills series is the most powerful to date, going deeper into the community “Andy” Mills has created for himself while taking on the power of secrecy in post-World War II San Francisco. Former cop, currently a PI—without the documentation—Andy is called upon in this book to locate Howard Salzberger, a queer bookseller who has a little brown book that documents all of his customers, and who has loose ties to Andy. Howard has a book he is planning to sell—perhaps about the Mafia?—when he suddenly disappears. While this is historical fiction, set in the ’50s, readers of Rough Pages will surely reflect on the harassment and persecution of librarians, teachers, and students who seek or make available LGBTQ content in present-day America.

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Review

The Christmas Jigsaw Murders

by Henrietta Thornton

Benedict’s many fans know that her Christmas mysteries (The Christmas Murder Game and Murder on the Christmas Express, both 2022) offer layers: they’re great cozy-adjacent mysteries (a bit more violent than many cozies) that involve word and jigsaw puzzles, and they include puzzles that the reader can solve along the way (or not; the stories are complete without the “side” activities). In this title, Benedict tells readers to look for the titles of Fleetwood Mac songs sprinkled throughout the text (in honor of bandmember Christine McVie’s 2002 death). Despite its lovable-grump protagonist, Edie O’Sullivan, being a “Christmisanthropist,” the author has also tucked anagrams of Dickens’ novels and Christmas stories into her family tale. The family is crossword setter and jigsaw enthusiast Edie’s—her current family, police-officer great-nephew, Sean, and his husband, who throughout the book are interviewing to be adoptive parents; Edie’s former partner, Sky, around whom she has great regrets; and family from the past, whose loss has paralyzed Edie’s Christmas spirit ever since. This year, she’s forced out of her Scrooge zone when six jigsaw puzzle pieces are delivered to her home with a warning that “Four, maybe more, people will be dead by midnight on Christmas Eve, unless you can put all the pieces together and stop me.” Our heroine is on her toes as killings and more pieces ensue, as is Benedict’s clever plotting and her writing’s emotional heft. A great story for any time of year.

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Review

The Note

by Henrietta Thornton

Friends Lauren, Kelsey, and May call themselves the Canceled Crew. Each has been vilified in the media, Lauren, who’s Black, because it’s assumed that she slept her way to her job as director of the Houston Symphony; May, who’s Chinese American, for a terrible incident on a subway platform that was filmed and went viral; and Kelsey, who’s white and rich, for being suspected of killing her husband. The women are now on a girl’s weekend in the Hamptons, trying to put it all behind them and let their hair down a bit, but the note of the book’s title throws them back into chaos. It’s a prank that isn’t so funny after the recipient goes missing and the three women are firmly back in the spotlight, a situation that widens every crack in their relationship with one another and their partners and families. Burke makes every character hyper real here, portraying the effects of privilege, thoughtlessness, and poor decisions with deft precision. The strong ties we feel to old friends, no matter current circumstances, are also shown in sharp relief. Add to this a page-turning whodunit element and it all adds up to a cracking read.

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Review

Olive You to Death

by Jeff Ayers

South Cove, the number one tourist trap on the Pacific Coast Highway, becomes a haven again for mystery and intrigue. Jill learns that the venue where she and her police detective boyfriend, Greg, will get married, is unavailable, and she begins to sweat. Another wedding between local antique dealer Josh and his younger girlfriend, Mandy, goes awry when she vanishes without a trace. Was she kidnapped, or did she bail on the wedding and run away, like most of the locals think? An old journal that Josh discovers proves problematic when a professor he was conferring with dies under mysterious circumstances that appear to be related to the journal, which just might contain a treasure map. Jill wants to solve both the disappearance of Mandy and who killed the professor, but she’ll have to do it behind her fiancé’s back. Cahoon juggles a lot of details, but it all works with her charming town and compelling characters. The multi-layered mysteries keep the reader both guessing and turning the pages. Even 16 books in, the series still seems fresh and engaging. Whether your first visit to South Cove or your 16th, it’s a town where you will want to stay for a while.

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Review

The Village Library Demon-Hunting Society

by Brian Kenney

Take a bit of Buffy, throw in some of Murder, She Wrote, let a very officious cat, Lord Thomas Cromwell, channel an ancient demon—that bit is a trifle frightening—set it all in rural New York state under the auspices of local librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle, and you have a novel both fun-loving and poignant. Sherry realizes that something is a bit off in Winesnap, NY. Namely, people are regularly being killed, and she typically ends up helping the cops track down the murderer. But when a friend’s husband is found dead, Sherry ups her game, assembling a small group, the Demon Hunting Society, including the new town priest (good for exorcism!). No interest in the supernatural? Don’t be silly. This book has a big enough reach to appeal to any cozy reader, with Sherry delivering a riveting denouement in the manner of Dame Agatha.

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Review

Death at the Sign of the Rook

by Brian Kenney

The five novels featuring former police officer Jackson Brodie—this would be the sixth—are each a bit idiosyncratic. But Atkinson’s many fans need to brace themselves for this title, a delightful, cozyish homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. We start out at a Murder Mystery Weekend in Rook Hall, “a country house hotel located within Burton Makepeace House, one of England’s premier stately homes.” Dowager Marchioness Lady Milton and her hateful offspring have already auctioned off most of the artwork, commercialized what they could, and sold the remaining cottages. Back to Jackson, hired by a brother and sister to track down their mother’s carer, who disappeared with a Renaissance portrait—artist and provenance unknown—shortly after their mother died. There are some extraordinary similarities, not in the art itself, but between how the Renaissance work, and a Turner painting that went missing from Burton Makepease House several years back, were stolen. Which is how Jackson ends up at the Mystery Weekend. This book dazzles in three ways. One, the interior monologues—Atkins goes deep into the lives of many of the characters—are just brilliant. Two, the dialogue is terrifically clever, with the aristocrats in particular pulling no punches. Three, the gathering for Mystery Weekend brings together all manner of participants, from the vicar to a California cardiologist to an army major to a couple of corpses, in an evening that turns out to be as dark as it is comic. And did I mention the snowstorm that traps them all in Burton Makepeace House?

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Review

Your Dark Secrets

by Brian Kenney

Marr’s thrillers have a knack for getting inside the minds and lives of modern women, and this one continues that run, here in the high-flying (and sometimes just high) world of celebrity PR. Addison Stern is a bitchy, ruthless PR star to the stars. She’ll do anything for her clients, including ruining junior media employees who might be naive enough to try to look beneath the surface of the stars’ fake tans and Botox. She’s vying for a partnership at her firm, and finding her pharma-bro client, Phinneas Redwood, dead is not what she needs, especially when that murder is followed by other crimes that all lead investigators to Addison. She never thought she’d see the day, but she partners with her private-detective ex, Connor Windell—he’s only too happy to leave a losing streak in Las Vegas—to get to the bottom of things and save herself. The two are off on a jet-setting investigation that takes them to Monaco and other more-money-than-sense places in search of the truth. The touch of Jackie Collins here–the ridiculous riches if not the steaminess—adds a deliciously over-the-top touch to a fast-moving, satisfying whodunit.

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