Akunin continues to notch the most consistently varied approaches to the adventures of the Great Detective on record.
Akunin returns to 1900 Moscow, where a suicide club’s numbers threaten to diminish to the vanishing point unless evergreen investigator Erast Petrovich Fandorin (The Coronation, 2019, etc.) can put an end to its distressing trend.
Masha Mironova arrives in Moscow with a modest inheritance, a strong aversion to her native Irkutsk, and a starry-eyed determination to be reunited with Petya Lileiko, a carelessly attractive swain from the big city who’d wooed her as Harlequin during his visit to her hometown. What she finds is a little different from what she’d expected. At first the suitor who’d effortlessly pried her away from her designated fiance seems hardly to recall her; when he does, he whisks her off to a club hosting the Lovers of Death, where the cultish leader Blagovolsky, who’s dubbed himself Prospero, lords it over an ill-assorted gathering that includes Prospero’s assistant, Ophelia; noted poet Lorelei Rubinstein; seductive Kriton; medical dissector Horatio; accountant Caliban; twins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; grammar school student Gdlevsky; Petya’s fellow university student Avaddon; and Petya himself, who’s known to the group as Cherubino. All of them share a consuming interest in suicide. Ophelia, a medium, calls on the spirits of the group’s late members to inform the group which among them has been nominated for self-slaughter. But soon after Masha, who adopts the sobriquet Columbine, is admitted to the Lovers of Death, Ophelia’s demise leaves the group casting about for an alternative way to decide which candidates should be moved to the head of the queue. Meantime, alarmed by the rash of suicides and suspecting that the club may be linked to anti-czarist terrorists, Lt. Col. Besikov arranges for Fandorin, operating under his own pseudonym, to infiltrate the group. The results, including the alter ego that conceals Fandorin, are creepily entertaining though never exactly mysterious in the ways you might expect.
Akunin continues to notch the most consistently varied approaches to the adventures of the Great Detective on record.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4814-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
