A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.
A prima ballerina investigates a homicide by dangerous stage prop in this rollicking mystery.
Robbins’ third On Pointe yarn finds Leah Siderova, the aging, sore-kneed ballerina of New York City’s American Ballet Company, enmeshed in yet another murder at the world’s deadliest dance troupe. The victim this time is artist and set designer Maurice Kaminsky, who built a rickety escalator for Leah to ascend when she dances the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker. Maurice turns up mangled to death in the contraption’s gears. Suspects include Maurice’s husband, Brett, the company’s domineering choreographer; Tex, Leah’s dance partner, who may have been sleeping with the victim; a filmmaker who was shooting a documentary about the designer; Maurice’s art dealer, who stands to gain from the inflation of his paintings’ prices; and Victor Roth, a wolfishly charming lawyer. Assisting Leah is her posse of amateur detectives, including her crime writer mother, Barbara; her Aunt Rachel; the dancer’s cagey Russian ballet coach, Madame Maksimova; and Olga Shevchenko, Madame’s friend, who may be in the Russian mob. Along the way, Leah juggles relationships with hunky emergency room doctor Zach Mitchell and Jonah Sobol, the sexy but poker-faced police detective assigned to the case. When another body plummets from the sky, Leah fears that she might be the killer’s next target. Robbins, a former ballerina, steeps the novel in the glamorous grunge of the dance world as Leah nurses her aching body, obsessively counts the calories in every spinach leaf, dodges a too-familiar donor, and fences with her (metaphorically) back-stabbing rival, Kerry Blair. The author stocks the story with sharply etched characters and deploys vast schools of red herring to keep readers guessing as Leah and her pals ponder every possible perpetrator. Robbins renders this well-observed zoo in lively prose that weaves between catty humor—“When I dance Juliet’s death scene, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. If you get top billing, there won’t be a dry eye at the box office”—and bloody mayhem. (“His head lay at an odd angle, and he had four severe cuts, one on his face and three across his chest. Glitter from the set was mixed in with the blood.”) The result is a suspenseful romp with loads of atmosphere.
A highly entertaining whodunit with a twisty plot and plenty of biting ballet intrigue.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9781685121969
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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