Tied together by bird sightings, both the main characters spend page after page contemplating what they’ve seen, said and...
The death of a young girl brings together a dull female police officer and an equally dull professor who specializes in sorting through classic versions of fairy tales in Littlewood’s lackluster sophomore effort.
When the body of 15-year-old Chrissie Farrell is found after PC Cate Corbin has taken a missing persons report from her mother, Angie, police are stymied to see that the girl’s body has been theatrically arranged. The blonde Chrissie had been crowned queen of a dance she’d attended at school and still wore that crown in death, but someone had also staged her body to resemble Snow White. Angie had received a strange package earlier in the day that revealed a bottle of what appeared to be blood, stoppered by one of her daughter’s toes. In observing the body, Cate’s reminded of the fairy tale and goes seeking Alice Hyland, the professor, who earlier that day had spotted an oddly menacing and out-of-place solid blue bird. As birdwatchers stalk the area searching for the rare bird, additional bodies turn up, also in the guise of fairy tales. Cate and Alice follow the trail, trying to find the killer before he or she strikes again. Billed as both a crime and horror novel, Littlewood reprises the flat, monotone voice she affected in her first book (A Cold Season, 2013). Neither Cate nor Alice nor any of the book’s characters come across as memorable, and readers looking for suspense will be less caught up in wondering when the killer’s next victim will surface than they will be waiting for whatever character Littlewood has on deck to finish the interminable thoughts that string together the much-too-infrequent action.
Tied together by bird sightings, both the main characters spend page after page contemplating what they’ve seen, said and done, making for a frustrating story that will please neither fans of crime nor fans of horror.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62365-855-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jo Fletcher/Quercus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
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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