Sex, drugs, blackmail, real estate. The results are never less than proficient, never more than routine.
The death of somebody’s right-hand man is the latest challenge for DCI Bill Slider and his mates at Shepherd’s Bush police station.
Eli Sampson, the marginal West London car repairman who reports finding a body on his grounds only because he can’t think what else to do, swears that he’s never seen the man before, living or dead. And the condition of the corpse—sporting an expensive watch, lacking any more definite ID, and remarkably free of mud down to the soles of his shoes—gives his protestations some credence. So who is Leo King, as he's finally identified, who’s evidently left no one behind to mourn him except for freelance masseuse Shanice Harper? He was born Leon Kimmelman, but who was he when he died? Encouraged by Slider’s discovery of a thumb drive that had escaped someone's thorough tossing of Kimmelman’s flat—a drive containing video of Greater London Assemblyman Kevin Rathkeale disporting himself aboard a houseboat with a pair of male prostitutes and some high-value cocaine—the coppers at Shepherd’s Bush (Old Bones, 2017, etc.) question blandly evasive Charles Holdsworth, whose holding company owns the houseboat; his wife, Avril, who’s clearly afraid of something; charismatic Myra Silverman, whose work as CEO of KidZone brought her close together with Rathkeale in ways she must now bitterly regret; and locals who toss off dire hints about some huggermugger development in Davy Lane. Their questions seem to be bouncing off rubber walls until a sudden break in the case allows Slider to fit the pieces together and sets the stage for the tale’s most satisfying episode: a round-robin series of interrogations in which the sullen conspirators who took Kimmelman’s life and nearly took Slider’s too take turns pointing increasingly frantic fingers at each other.
Sex, drugs, blackmail, real estate. The results are never less than proficient, never more than routine.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8751-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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