A clever mystery whose historical setting painstakingly dramatizes the many evils of slavery.
July 4, 1861, finds the U.S. teetering on the brink of the First Battle of Bull Run, an engagement many think will end the Civil War quickly.
Washington is bursting with Northern troops waiting to fight. But the longer nothing happens, the more trouble they cause in a sleepy town woefully unprepared to feed and house them. Aspiring reporter Sophie Gates is on her way to attend a session of Congress when she runs into Constance Lemagne, a Southern belle she’d met while helping presidential aide Adam Quinn solve several murders. Adam’s a frontiersman and old friend of President Abraham Lincoln’s, who’s given him the power to investigate all sorts of problems (Murder in the Oval Library, 2018, etc.). When Sophie and Constance find a man hanging from a crane in the Rotunda, they know just whom to call. Adam, an expert tracker, can tell by the footprints at the scene that the man was murdered and calls upon his friend George Hilton, a black man constantly in danger despite his status as a physician, to help prove it. The dead man, Pinebar Tufts, worked at the Patent Office. His wife, who claims that he had no enemies, admits that he recently had more money and hinted at plans for a better future. When Constance’s father is gravely injured in a carriage accident and the doctor caring for him wants to amputate his leg, a desperate Constance goes to Hilton for help, arriving just in time to save him from thugs who have already beaten him badly. Sophie doesn’t trust Constance, who fiercely believes in the Southern way of life, but still befriends her, along with Felicity Monroe, a stunning young society woman whose upcoming nuptials are the talk of the town. The next to die is the night watchman at the Capitol. Soon after, Sophie discovers a dangerous secret involving Felicity, and Constance undertakes a spy mission for the Rebels. Adam may have his hands full, but plucky Sophie is always there to help as their romantic feelings blossom.
A clever mystery whose historical setting painstakingly dramatizes the many evils of slavery.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2398-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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