The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.
Except for the atrocities of World War II, there hasn’t been a murder on the Channel Island of Alderney from time immemorial. The staging of the Alderney Lit Fest brings that streak to a decided end.
The powers that be at Penguin Random House want to send retired DI Daniel Hawthorne and Anthony Horowitz, the writer who fictionalizes the mysteries Hawthorne’s solved, to Alderney. Anthony, always grousing at being treated like a second-class collaborator, is willing to go, and so, surprisingly, is the reclusive Hawthorne. The other luminaries invited to the tiny island include blind psychic Elizabeth Lovell, TV chef Marc Bellamy, war historian George Elkin, children’s franchiser Anne Cleary, and French performance poet Maïssa Lamar. No sooner have the festivities begun than Charles le Mesurier, whose online gambling company is sponsoring them, is taped to a chair, with only his right hand left free, and stabbed to death. The limited resources and competence of the local police make the case a natural for Hawthorne, who obligingly circulates among his counterparts long enough to rattle every one of the many skeletons in their closets. But he faces a serious setback when a second murder spurs Deputy Chief Officer Jonathan Torode of Guernsey Crime Services to identify a culprit Hawthorne agrees is highly plausible. How will the great detective cope with being beaten to the punch? Fans of the author’s formidable brain teasers, certain that the devil is in the details, will be a lot more confident than he is.
The most conventional of Horowitz’s mysteries to date still reads like a golden-age whodunit on steroids.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-293-816-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
“Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.
It’s doomsday eve on a small Greek island where the last post-apocalyptic community on earth will be destroyed unless a murdered scientist’s secret research can be uncovered.
The rest of the world ended 90 years ago, just as humankind was close to overcoming climate change. Now, a lethal black fog is approaching the island, where 122 villagers live peacefully, albeit with an unreliable female AI voice inside their heads. All but the rebellious woman Emory are content not to question geographical boundaries they are not allowed to cross or mysterious programming that can wipe their memories, make them fall asleep at 8:45 p.m. every night, and die at 60—a bum deal considering the extraordinarily long lives of the three elders, including Niema, the murder victim. A brilliant scientist who in another lifetime was awarded two Nobel Prizes and later devised the barrier blocking the fog, she was 173. Hours after announcing she would reveal hidden truths about the island and the extreme experiments she was conducting to safeguard its future, she was stabbed to death. Solving her murder is key to saving the island. Turton, who specializes in odd, raging conflicts in closed settings—a London manor in The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018); a cursed 17th-century ship in The Devil and the Dark Water (2020)—here takes on a bunch of big themes including the nature of existence and the value of life. H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, without the monsters, comes to mind. Long and talky and light on characterizations, Turton’s latest is a bit mechanical in the telling, perhaps owing to the AI’s role as narrator. But it’s a fresh twist on dystopian fiction with its share of surprises.
“Don’t go in the water” takes on new meaning in Turton’s brainy thriller.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781728254654
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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