Category: Reviews

Viking
Published April 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Greta is delighted to put her stifling finishing school behind her and return to her brother’s Long Island estate, where she hopes to relax and sink into some good books. That proves a bit difficult when she finds guests staying there. Tom is an overbearing bear of a man who spars with Greta’s brother Jay, rubbing in his status as a man with a vast amount of inherited wealth. She’s thrilled to see the charming Nick is among the visitors, but he has eyes for a professional golfer who is far more sophisticated and beguiling than Greta. Her brother is a generous host who loves beautiful things and hosting wild parties, but has never quite escaped the hardscrabble past he and his sister endured before he made his fortune. And he clearly is hopelessly in love with Tom’s wife.

Continue reading “The Gatsby Gambit by Claire Anderson-Wheeler”

Berkley
Published April 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

She’s back, the headstrong, opinionated, sixty-year-old Chinese tea shop owner, ready to investigate another mystery after 2023’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers. In this case, she meets a trouble young woman who shows her the photo of her missing friend Thomas, but who can’t bring herself to report it to the police. While cat sitting for her son and his police-detective girlfriend, she does a bit of snooping and finds a file about a dead man. He looks exactly like the photo of the missing person, though his name isn’t Thomas. Instead he’s Xander Lin, a wildly popular influencer who, according to his online profile, was immensely wealthy and well-connected.

Continue reading “Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto”

Grove Atlantic
Published April 8, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

The thing in question is an egg: a rare, bright red guillemot egg coveted by rich men who greedily collect eggs in the early twentieth century. They want it so they can possess something their wealthy competitors don’t have.

A small girl, raised in poverty and neglected by her family, has discovered the egg. The land she lives on in Yorkshire overlooks the sea, where sheer cliffs are home to countless nesting seabirds. Men have been harvesting eggs from the cliffs to sell to collectors, but there’s an overhang in this area that has made it impossible, until a very small child could slip through a narrow crevice to be lowered down on a rope to try her luck. It would be a fine thing to have some eggs to eat – but the egg she brings up turns out to be worth more than she can imagine.

Continue reading “The Impossible Thing by Belinda Bauer”

William Morrow
Published March 18, 2025
Reviewed by Sharon Mensing

There are only two characters in Killer Potential that matter and are well developed: Evie Gordon, an overeducated and underemployed SAT tutor; and Jae Park, an enigmatic and silent woman rescued from captivity by Evie. The book begins with Evie arriving at the house of one of her students, finding a dead body or two as well as a woman calling for help, and making an impulse decision that has the pair running from the authorities. The initial feel of the book, with Evie narrating her story, is very self-satirizing and cynical. Once Evie and Jae meet up and the real action begins, that tone drops away in favor of a much more declarative structure. Short sentences and phrases, as well as short chapters, move the plot forward.

Continue reading “Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch”

Soho Press 
Published April 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

In 1924, a White Russian agitator and a Japanese martial artist wielding a samurai sword meet in Richmond Park, London, to make an exchange. But before the Russian can hand over a valuable artifact, a dragon taming mace, the transfer is interrupted by a quartet, first encountered in The Murder of Mr Ma (2024). Judge Dee Ren Jie, recently returned from China on a secret mission, has once again disguised himself as a dime novel hero, Springheel Jack, in order to recover the mace for its rightful owner. Aided by his loyal assistants merchant Hoong, young pickpocket Jimmy Fingers, and academic Lao She, the theft is thwarted and the mace is returned to Wu Zie Tian, a wealthy and beautiful Chinese businesswoman living in Mayfair.

Continue reading “The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan”

Severn House
Published April 1, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

The twenty-fifth entry in this London-based police procedural series opens at the Shepherd’s Bush police station.  For those familiar with the series, the opening chapter holds a shocking twist: Atherton is thinking of proposing marriage to his girlfriend. Even readers new to the series will gather this is as momentous as it seems to his friend and colleague, Detective Inspector Bill Slider. Atherton is a ladies’ man, not one to settle down. That would seem likely to be the most exciting thing to happen at the Shepherd’s Bush police station – it’s sleepy August after all – until word of a suspicious death reaches them.

Continue reading “Easeful Death by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles”