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THE WHISKING HOUR

Juliet Capshaw may be heavily pregnant with twins, but that doesn’t slow her down; she’s still coming up with new delicacies for Torte, her bakery in Ashland, Oregon, and keeping up a social life with her husband, Carlos, and their neighbors. One of her dearest friends is Lance Rousseau, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, whose productions bring in hordes of tourists. Lance’s wedding to longtime partner Arlo is nearly foundering in the face of Lance’s ambitious plans. At the moment, the play on view is Perfect Crime, and behind the scenes, there’s a great deal of tension between the actors and their director, Kean Armitage, which Lance hopes will be mitigated by the fabulous cast party he and Jules are planning. Once Jules meets the actors, she’s surprised by the hostility surrounding Armitage, who harasses the women; feuds with his bitter soon-to-be ex-wife, Vera Armitage, who claims to be a reviewer; and insists on a method approach that’s turned his male lead into a stalker. Given the short notice, Jules and her staff are busy preparing food for the party, but it all comes to a screeching halt when Armitage is shot dead in a dressing room. Jules has already helped her stepfather, who’s the law in Ashland, solve a long string of crimes, so she’s ready to pitch in to help the police. After all, she’s already spent enough time talking to cast members to know there may be a surfeit of possible killers.

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THE WHISKING HOUR

Ellie Alexander

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RELEASE DATE: yesterday

The mystery plays second fiddle in this foodie’s delight, replete with appetizing descriptions and appended recipes.

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A play about a murder adds a real murder to the plot.

Juliet Capshaw may be heavily pregnant with twins, but that doesn’t slow her down; she’s still coming up with new delicacies for Torte, her bakery in Ashland, Oregon, and keeping up a social life with her husband, Carlos, and their neighbors. One of her dearest friends is Lance Rousseau, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, whose productions bring in hordes of tourists. Lance’s wedding to longtime partner Arlo is nearly foundering in the face of Lance’s ambitious plans. At the moment, the play on view is Perfect Crime, and behind the scenes, there’s a great deal of tension between the actors and their director, Kean Armitage, which Lance hopes will be mitigated by the fabulous cast party he and Jules are planning. Once Jules meets the actors, she’s surprised by the hostility surrounding Armitage, who harasses the women; feuds with his bitter soon-to-be ex-wife, Vera Armitage, who claims to be a reviewer; and insists on a method approach that’s turned his male lead into a stalker. Given the short notice, Jules and her staff are busy preparing food for the party, but it all comes to a screeching halt when Armitage is shot dead in a dressing room. Jules has already helped her stepfather, who’s the law in Ashland, solve a long string of crimes, so she’s ready to pitch in to help the police. After all, she’s already spent enough time talking to cast members to know there may be a surfeit of possible killers.

The mystery plays second fiddle in this foodie’s delight, replete with appetizing descriptions and appended recipes.

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Pub Date: yesterday

ISBN: 9781250410023

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE |

COZY MYSTERY |

DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS

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New York Times Bestseller

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STOLEN IN DEATH

J.D. Robb

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RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2026

The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.

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New York Times Bestseller

Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.

Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.

The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.

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Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026

ISBN: 9781250414526

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE |

DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS |

CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Kathy Reichs

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RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE |

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE |

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE |

SUSPENSE |

THRILLER |

DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS |

SUSPENSE |

GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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