Total eclipse of the heart.
Fourth and last in this British author’s experimental Red Riding Quartet crime epic: a raw and furious wade through the Valley of Death that understates its big sweet hell of pages chock-a-block with violated corpses and red rain running with blood.
Peace’s Boschian landscape of West Yorkshire’s all-out dystopia began with Nineteen Seventy Four (2000) and a young girl’s murdered body, found in a ditch with swan’s wings sewn to its shoulder blades. While atmospheric with ’70s music and ads, that first installment set the quartet’s bleak Orwellian tone, though with echoes of the complex modes of Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and the demonic grimness, violence, corruption and conspiracies of James Ellroy. But as Nineteen Seventy Seven (2001) shows, Peace’s obscene vision of cut-up bodies, castration, girls scalped and strangled, is all his own, with memorial images of swan’s wings floating through all four novels. Peace’s Yorkshire Ripper, who disembodies prostitutes with a screwdriver, is taken from real life (as in Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and as with nearly all of Peace’s crimes), and family members of the dead have to live with Peace’s fear-reminding, gore-riddled pages. Nineteen Eighty (2001) finds the Ripper still abroad but with Yorkshire undergoing vast social change and the police corruption and true-fact crimes adding unusual depth to the series’ black nightmare. Now, Peace brings back a handful of earlier characters to help work up the reader’s revulsion and nausea. Corrupt Detective Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson, owl-like with thick lenses in black frames, is tracking the kidnapping and probable murder of ten-year-old Hazel Atkins, but his mind still swims with memories of Clare Kemplay, she with the swan’s wings, now murdered a decade ago. Also on hand is lawyer Big John Piggott, who no longer believes that retarded Michael Myshkin, whose forced confession has him serving time for Clare’s murder, actually did it. And on the run is thief and sexual rent boy BJ.
Total eclipse of the heart.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-85242-684-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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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