Cotterill’s long-running series, now on its 13th installment, runs on the chemistry of his quirky comic characters, who once...
A mysterious skeleton, a controversial film project, local government corruption…who else could solve this puzzle but curmudgeonly coroner Dr. Siri?
Fresh from his misadventures at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow (The Rat Catchers Olympics, 2017, etc.), elderly instigator Dr. Siri Paiboun has an ambitious new project: an epic film based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He’s even managed to sneak a $15,000 camera back into repressive Laos. Chief Inspector Phosy of the Vientiane police thinks Siri has been smuggling in weapons but must proceed delicately, both because he’s only recently been promoted and because his wife, the acerbic and domineering Nurse Dtui, was Dr. Siri’s assistant during his tenure as the country’s coroner. Phosy instead confronts Siri’s pampered, high-maintenance wife, Madam Daeng, at her noodle shop. Dtui now works as a nursing instructor, but her experience and expertise are needed when a female skeleton is discovered at the base of the Anusawari Victory Arch, an event foreshadowed in the creepy opening chapter. Siri’s film project is sidelined while he assembles his “group of crime fighters” to unravel the mystery. Their probe takes them by turns to the airport, a nest of animal oppressors, and the chambers of a corrupt judge. Meantime, the film project crawls drolly along.
Cotterill’s long-running series, now on its 13th installment, runs on the chemistry of his quirky comic characters, who once again deliver delightfully. Tart chapter titles like “Enough Perverts to Keep Us All Busy” add another layer of ironic humor.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-940-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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BOOK REVIEW
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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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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