The second in this new series from veteran McPherson (Scot Free, 2018, etc.) is a hilarious romp that’s dead serious when it...
What seems like a Halloween prank is a cover for murder.
After meeting and marrying a wealthy dentist in haste, Scottish clinical psychologist Lexy Campbell has divorced and retreated to the northern California town of Cuento. She lives on a tiny houseboat moored in a slough behind the Last Ditch Motel, which houses her odd but lovable friends. Owner Noleen’s wife, Kathi, is a germaphobe who keeps the place spotless. To accommodate married doctors Roger and Todd, she keeps the bugs down with illegal imported pesticides, since Todd has a severe case of cleptoparasitosis. All seems well until they pull up the beer Lexy’s been cooling in the slough for their Halloween party and a dead body comes with it. Detective Molly “Mike” Rankinson shows up to investigate the bloated corpse, which is wearing an orange wig topped by a tartan tammy. Only Lexy notices the dead man's ring, which has vanished by the time the divers pull the anonymous victim from the water, but it turns into the clue that will identify him. Mike brushes off Lexy when she urges her to read Robert Burns’ poem “Tam O’Shanter,” which seems to predict other odd occurrences, like someone cutting off a horse’s tail. Despite this discouragement, the motley crew can’t ignore the mystery and finally ID the body as an unpopular high school student who left town for 50 years until a recent class reunion. Another member of the class vanished decades ago after their graduation party, and her mother has never given up the search for her. The missing girl’s classmates seem spooked when Lexy and her friends visit to chat them up and fish for clues. The secret’s clearly hidden in the past, though not too deeply for the intrepid amateur sleuths.
The second in this new series from veteran McPherson (Scot Free, 2018, etc.) is a hilarious romp that’s dead serious when it comes to the tricky mystery and an unexpected denouement.Pub Date: April 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5412-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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