The 10th in Gray’s popular Glasgow series (A Pound of Flesh, 2012, etc.) is sure to please fans as it continues to delve...
Four university students are thrilled to be sharing a luxury flat until their fifth roommate is murdered.
Stunning Eva Magnusson’s wealthy father doesn’t let grass grow under his feet. First he buys her a posh flat in Glasgow when she moves there from Sweden to do a course at the university; then he personally vets her flatmates: policeman’s daughter Kirsty Wilson, a nurturing young woman who loves to cook; quiet, young Colin Young, a budding writer; hefty Roger Dunbar, a useful sort to have around; and Gary Calderwood, an Englishman closest to Eva in social class. When Kirsty finds Eva beaten and strangled, all her flatmates are forced to dig deep into their hidden thoughts about her. The police find that Eva had sex shortly before her death, and when DNA proves it was with Colin, DI Jo Grant arrests him for murder. Certain that he’s innocent, Kirsty goes to her father’s boss, Detective Superintendent Lorimer, to ask for his help. But he can’t get Colin out of prison and only angers Grant when he asks her to dig deeper. The beating and strangling of several other pretty young blondes opens the possibility that Colin’s innocent. When Lorimer encourages Kristy to search Eva’s room and ask questions about her life, she’s shocked to learn that Eva has had sex with all her male flatmates plus any number of other men. Lorimer also enlists his friend professor Solomon Brightman, a psychologist and criminal profiler who’s helped him with other cases. Brightman interviews Colin and does think him innocent but also thinks that whoever is killing the other young women did not kill Eva. So Kirsty’s left to continue her amateur sleuthing while the professionals hunt down every clue in hopes of finding a killer or two.
The 10th in Gray’s popular Glasgow series (A Pound of Flesh, 2012, etc.) is sure to please fans as it continues to delve into the lives of the cops who solve the tricky mysteries he sets them.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-265925-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Witness Impulse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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