McCullough (The Touch, 2003, etc.) has achieved a passably engrossing police procedural.
Serial killer terrorizes Connecticut in veteran author McCullough’s debut thriller.
Set in 1965–66 in Holloman (i.e., New Haven), where racial tensions are beginning to roil, the action ignites from the chance discovery of a dismembered, racially mixed female corpse in a refrigerator used for storing incinerator-bound dead animals. The defunct critters were subjects of neurological studies conducted at the Hughlings Jackson Center, nicknamed the Hug. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico quarantines the Hug and interrogates its staff, “the Huggers,” including the statuesque jolie-laide Desdemona Dupre. Meanwhile, Wesley le Clerc, a Hugger nephew, exploits the gruesome find to help his mentor, Mohammed el Nesr, foment racial unrest. The investigation drags on in real-time tedium because Ivy League politics must be needlessly explicated and the POVs of far too many potential culprits (not a few conveniently equipped with private lairs) superficially mined. Since ’63, Carmine learns, several teenaged girls with café-au-lait complexions and sheltered upbringings have disappeared. These bodies presumably went up in smoke in the animal incinerator. As bimonthly abductions occur, all Connecticut is on high alert against the so-called Monster, dubbed the Ghost by cops. A 16-year-old is taken from a supposedly locked-down high school and two other girls vanish, now in monthly succession, despite massive surveillance of all Hugger homes and haunts. The killer has gone against type with a darker-skinned black and a white Lebanese victim, each found headless, and dressed in child’s beaded frocks, which Carmine finds were purchased with 1933-issue $100 bills. Forensic examinations reveal that all the victims were sadistically raped, but trace evidence is non-existent in these pre-DNA-testing days. Tipped off to some sinister family skeletons, Carmine identifies the common link all the victims share. After a successful police sting, Wesley le Clerc pulls a Jack Ruby on the prime suspect. Cheated of justice, Carmine settles down to married life with Desdemona, satisfied at least that he has banished the Ghost. Or has he?
McCullough (The Touch, 2003, etc.) has achieved a passably engrossing police procedural.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8642-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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