Even so, fans of acid domestic intrigue as only the British can serve it up will rejoice in the republication of this minor...
The latest exhumation from the British Library of Crime Classics is the 1934 debut of the pseudonymous Richard Henry Sampson (1896–1973), a deliciously black comedy of murder most botched.
Anticipating by more than 20 years the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, Hull presents the salt-and-cyanide duo of Edward Powell, a smugly unemployed dilettante of refined literary tastes, supercilious dialogue, and overweening vanity, and Mildred Powell, his maiden aunt, guardian under his grandmother’s will, and housemate in Brynmawr, outside the Welsh village of Llwll, a spot that’s either perfectly lovely or suffocatingly parochial, depending whom you ask. Even the most routine conversations between the two as they discuss, for example, whether Edward will be obliged to walk all the way to the village to pick up the latest parcel of French novels he’s ordered, are rife with such provocation on both sides as they scheme to secure the most minute psychic advantages over each other that even without the title, you’d know it would be only a matter of time before Edward decided that his life would be much richer, freer, and more untroubled without Aunt Mildred. Unfortunately, his initial attempt on her life, cleverly conceived as it is, doesn’t quite go according to plan. Now Edward must deal not only with the suspicion that will naturally fall on him if he’s successful and the fact that every soul in Llwll seems fully apprised of everyone else’s business and obsessed with the possibility of learning even more, but with the likelihood that Aunt Mildred has the wind up and that, as she repeatedly warns him, any future such activities on his part will force her to “take action.” A child could see where this is all heading.
Even so, fans of acid domestic intrigue as only the British can serve it up will rejoice in the republication of this minor classic despite an overlong last chapter that reveals the murderous narrator as even more witless, and his target as even more resourceful, than readers already knew.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0973-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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