The problem with casting a famous real-life mystery writer as your detective is that you can’t help inviting comparisons...
Free at last of the scandal of her notorious 1926 disappearance—though not quite yet of her adulterous spouse—Agatha Christie sails for the Canary Islands at the behest of the secret agent who helped rescue her from those complications (A Talent for Murder, 2017).
The first death, that of Secret Intelligence Service agent Douglas Greene, precedes Christie’s passage. In fact, it’s what makes John Davison press her to go to Tenerife in the first place. Nor does the second wait for her arrival. As Christie looks on in horror, Gina Trevelyan, a wronged wife who’s stowed away aboard the Gelria, launches herself over the side of the ship in a frenzy of grief, her body lost forever. Sculptor Helen Hart, the other woman whose affair with Guy Trevelyan has brought her to the ship as well, baffles Christie by taking moral responsibility for Gina’s death shortly after announcing, “I’m pleased the bitch is dead.” The Canaries themselves, home to sinister occultist Gerard Grenville, are equally dangerous for two of Christie’s fellow passengers from the Gelria and indeed for the celebrated novelist herself, who ends up hiding in a closet from which she watches as another passenger’s pearls are stolen by someone she can readily identify but declines to do so, even when Inspector Artemi Narciso Núñez arrests Christie herself for the theft and throws her in jail. The only way she’ll be able to help in solving Douglas Greene’s murder, it seems, will be if Wilson abates his fondness for local color long enough to allow His Majesty’s most unlikely secret agent to decide that it’s high time to link all the felonies that clutter this tangled tale.
The problem with casting a famous real-life mystery writer as your detective is that you can’t help inviting comparisons between your work and hers. It’s no shame to say that Wilson can’t stand up to such a comparison, but it’s no recommendation either.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4510-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Washington Square Press/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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