Come for the Venetian atmosphere and backstage tour of the opera house, and don't worry too much about the crime.
Commissario Guido Brunetti returns to La Fenice for another dramatic encounter with the diva Flavia Petrelli.
In his first appearance (Death at La Fenice, 1992), Brunetti looked into the murder of an eminent conductor, proving that Flavia wasn't the killer. A few years later, in Aqua Alta (1996), he saved her female lover's life. Now Flavia's back in Venice, and trouble follows as surely as the pigeons flock to Piazza San Marco. Someone has been showering her with too many yellow roses at performances around Europe, and things get creepier when she finds flowers by the door of the apartment she's borrowing in her friend—and former lover—Freddy's palazzo, especially when Freddy tells her he hasn't let anyone into the building. Then a voice student Flavia had complimented at La Fenice is pushed down the steps of a bridge, and Freddy is attacked. Brunetti needs to find Flavia's stalker (a strange word the computer-phobic detective finds mostly on English-language websites when he deigns to give Google a whirl) before someone gets killed. There isn't much of a mystery here, but there are the usual pleasures of following Brunetti as he walks around the city he knows like the back of his hand; goes home for lunch with his bookish wife, Paola, and their two teenagers; has dinner with his wealthy and surprisingly sensible in-laws; outmaneuvers his dim boss, Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta; and looks the other way while Patta's supercompetent secretary, Signorina Elettra, finds the information he needs in a possibly extra-legal manner. Leon begins each of her mysteries with an epigraph from an opera, and she obviously loves placing Brunetti backstage at La Fenice during a performance.
Come for the Venetian atmosphere and backstage tour of the opera house, and don't worry too much about the crime.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2353-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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