The heroine’s second adventure, a complicated mystery set against the turmoil that led to the War of the Roses, is most...
As King Richard II and his cousin Henry of Lancaster jostle for power, a widow caught between them struggles to support her family.
The year 1399 finds York widow Kate Clifford (The Service of the Dead, 2016) raising three children not her own. When her husband left her deep in debt, she took in his two bastard children; the third is the daughter of her eldest brother. All her brothers, including her twin, who remains always with her in her mind, were killed in a border feud that sent her mother, Eleanor, fleeing to Strasbourg with her second husband, Ulrich Smit. Now widowed again, Eleanor has returned, newly religious, with three companions to help set up a beguine house, a place where women lead a life of devotion but are not bound by vows. One night, Kate’s household is awakened by the baying of her wolfhounds, Lille and Ghent, signaling danger next door at the house her mother is leasing. Sister Dina is not in her room, and there’s a great deal of blood. York is full of armed men supposedly protecting the city from Henry, but their fealty to the unpopular king is uncertain. Kate can count on her loyal servants, Jennet and Berend, but no one else. Her mother is obviously hiding a secret, her brother-in-law is eager for her to remarry so he can get the business her husband left her, and her powerful uncle seems to support her but has hidden plans of his own. The traumatized Dina is eventually found, but the maidservant Nan, whose lover may have been involved, vanishes. Despite the lies that greet her every question, Kate is determined to find the truth and preserve her family from danger.
The heroine’s second adventure, a complicated mystery set against the turmoil that led to the War of the Roses, is most likely to appeal to fans of serious historical intrigue.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-452-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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