Plenty of details about the Amish lifestyle and a more complex mystery than the heroine’s first case.
A quiet Amish community is rattled by the death of a young girl.
Even though she makes the kapps (women's head coverings) for her community of Blue Sky, Pennsylvania, Kappy King has always been a marginal figure. Perhaps that’s why she’s befriended flamboyant Edie Peachey and her brother, Jimmy, who has Down syndrome. Edie’s under a bann after leaving the church and living as an Englischer, but when her mother was murdered, she came home to care for Jimmy and helped Kappy solve the mystery (Kappy King and the Puppy Kaper, 2017). After Sally June Esh’s buggy is run off the road and she’s killed while making the family pickle delivery, Edie gets a series of cryptic texts hinting that the death was no accident. Edie refuses to show the texts to detective Jack Jones, knowing that he’ll confiscate her phone; instead, she and Kappy decide to do a little sleuthing on their own. But there’s a problem. Although Edie’s dedicated to her brother and respects his love for their little farm and dog breeding business, she may not be ready to return to the church, and until she does, no one but Kappy will talk to her. All the while, Kappy’s still trying to decide whether she should marry Hiram, the widower of her best friend. Hiram’s particularly worried about his younger brother, Willie, who’s often taken off on adventures but this time is gone longer than usual. Kappy’s also attracted to Silas Hershberger, whose aunt has just moved back from Lancaster and wants to establish her own pickles as supreme. Would Bettie Hershberger really kill someone over pickles? Kappy and Edie travel by buggy and car all over the valley attending everything from funerals to rock concerts while trying to figure out whether Sally June’s death was accident or murder.
Plenty of details about the Amish lifestyle and a more complex mystery than the heroine’s first case.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4201-4299-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Zebra/Kensington
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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