Pointed banter between the heroine and pretty much everyone else keeps this debut sharp.
Murder at a prenatal class turns moms-to-be into sleuths.
An unexpected but not unwelcome pregnancy sends Londoners Alice and Joe to the Cotswold village of Penton in search of a quieter and less expensive place to welcome their imminent arrival. Penton’s “posh hippy” vibe intrigues but intimidates the couple, who revel in the town’s lush landscape but have to sleep on an air mattress because their bed won’t fit up the narrow staircase in their tiny cottage. Hoping to learn enough to get through the life-changing event that’s now less than a month off, they sign up for a prenatal crash course; the class will meet in three sessions over two weekends in the upstairs room of Nature’s Way, a shop catering to folks who want to replace their wind chimes or buy a few dozen new dream catchers. Dot, the class leader, believes anyone can give birth comfortably using no painkiller stronger than willow bark tea. Her approach is put to the test when Alice’s fellow student Hen goes into labor during the second session and welcomes her new daughter between screams of agony. Hen’s delivery, however, isn’t the evening’s headliner. Paramedics who arrive to offer Hen some modern medical care inform the prenatal students that there’s a “dead guy downstairs” in the shop. The police confirm that while Hen was loudly giving birth upstairs, the store’s owner, Crispin Oliver, quietly expired downstairs, and apparently not of natural causes. Alice and Hen join forces with steady Poppy and volatile Ailsa, their fellow students, to learn who would dispatch a gentle shopkeeper whose besetting sin was to offer slippery elm bark tea to expectant moms who’d really rather have a beer.
Pointed banter between the heroine and pretty much everyone else keeps this debut sharp.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781250322708
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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