A scholarly heroine, endearing characters and settings, and enigmatic clues make for a satisfying mystery.
A magical bookstore near Niagara Falls helps its guardian solve another crime.
Only professor Violet Waverly and her grandmother Daisy know the secret of the 200-year-old birch tree that lives in the center of Charming Books and must be refreshed with magical spring water every day by its current guardian, Violet, who has assumed a job passed down through her family’s female line. The shop’s magical ability to put books containing vital clues in her path has helped Violet solve several murders. Joel Redding, a sleazy private investigator Violet met during her last case (Murder and Metaphors, 2019), has been following her and trying to suss out her secret for his own benefit. Grandma Daisy has arranged a bike race to raise money for the Underground Railroad museum she plans to install at City Hall, but the plan is on hold because of problems with the building’s structural foundation. When Redding turns up at the race, he’s killed in what seems like an accident until cut brake lines are discovered. For some reason, he’s carrying a copy of Leaves of Grass, which the bookstore had been placing in Violet’s path for unknown reasons. Although Violet has never revealed her secret to her boyfriend, Chief of Police David Rainwater, Redding’s death ratchets up the pressure to confide in him. Redding had rented a bike from a local shop where Jo Fitzgerald, one of Violet’s students, works. Now Jo, who’s been acting strangely, seems to be hiding from the police. Certain that she’s no killer, Violet, with some help from her cat, Emerson, and the bookstore’s resident talking crow, Faulkner, starts sleuthing and reading Leaves of Grass for clues. As she pieces together possible motives, she learns that Walt Whitman had actually visited Cascade Springs and may even provide the motive for the murder.
A scholarly heroine, endearing characters and settings, and enigmatic clues make for a satisfying mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64385-151-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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