A slow-burning, spellbinding whodunit. Agatha Christie, to whom it’s dedicated, would be proud.
The search for answers about a missing schoolgirl takes 30 years to pay off.
Fifteen-year-old Lára Marteinsdóttir, who’d contracted to work the summer of 1956 as a domestic helper for former Supreme Court of Iceland barrister Óttar Óskarsson and his wife, Ólöf Blöndal, in their retreat on the little island of Videy, announces one morning that she’s packed her bags and is leaving early to rejoin her parents in Reykjavík. The couple are jolted by her early departure, but her parents are far more jolted when she never shows up. Since not many young women go missing in Iceland, the case, first investigated by police officer Kristján Kristjánsson, swiftly becomes a cause célèbre, but that doesn’t lead to a solution—not in 1956, not in 1966, not in 1976. It’s not until 1986, on the eve of Reykjavík’s 200th anniversary, that Valur Róbertsson, a promising reporter for the struggling weekly Vikubladid, gets a phone call from someone calling herself Julía that so whets his interest in the case that he keeps overpromising developments to editor Dagbjartur Steinsson, who in turn pushes him harder and harder and even leaks a wildly premature announcement of his upcoming scoop to other news outlets. Valur focuses on a quartet of old friends—Óskarsson himself, city councillor Páll Jóhannesson, developer Högni Eyfjörd, and wholesaler Finnur Stephensen, whose dying words to his actress wife were “You have to go to Videy”—who regularly met on the island. When Valur is unable to deliver the goods, his sister, Sunna Róbertsdóttir, puts her dissertation in comparative literature on hold and takes over the investigation just as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev announce their plans to meet in Reykjavík for their historic summit.
A slow-burning, spellbinding whodunit. Agatha Christie, to whom it’s dedicated, would be proud.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781250907332
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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