The flowers of evil, sketched in lurid botanical detail.
As the Second Empire wanes, a series of murders baffles a dissolute Parisian police commissioner and his long-suffering factotum.
Van Laerhoven packs much complexity into 256 pages, giving this historical mystery the heft of a far longer work—but not the coherence. In 1870, Napoleon III is losing the Franco-Prussian war, Paris is under siege, and aristocrats are girding themselves for yet another revolution. Amid the chaos, police commissioner Paul Lefèvre, whose police work is often derailed by his unbridled lust for courtesans and cocottes, and his dour assistant, Bernard Bouveroux, who still chastely mourns his long-dead wife, are puzzling over a series of grisly murders that have a common element: All the corpses are found with scraps of Charles Baudelaire’s verse. Although the notorious author of Les Fleurs du Mal died in 1867, the poetry appears to be in his handwriting. As the investigation continues, the narration fragments as other characters add their voices to the puzzle. The diminutive Simone Bourbier, aka Poupeye, a charlatan and sometime clairvoyant, lures Lefèvre to her lair with promises of an orgy, from which he emerges dazed and addled as Simone, along with Claire de la Lune, Lefèvre’s favorite lady of the night, vanishes. Simone’s diary reveals that she is actually Baudelaire's twin sister, born with a deformity that caused the twins’ mother to consign her to a convent. Simone confesses her incestuous affair with Charles, which resulted both in her infection with syphilis and the birth of her daughter—Claire de la Lune. As the revelations pile up—the twins’ guilt-ridden mother makes an appearance, as do scenes from Lefèvre’s and Bouveroux’s military service in Algeria and episodes from Lefèvre’s tormented childhood—the whodunit aspect quickly becomes secondary, since one of the many characters is the obvious culprit. Instead, the book’s main preoccupation is the conclusive demonstration that everyone is guilty of something—the only mystery is, to what degree?
The flowers of evil, sketched in lurid botanical detail.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-548-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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