Still the next best thing to moving to Venice.
Things are slow at the Questura—perhaps there's less crime in Venice since the pandemic is keeping tourists away?—so Commissario Guido Brunetti has plenty of time to look into something that's been troubling an old neighbor.
Brunetti had never really liked Elisabetta Foscarini when they briefly lived in the same building as teenagers, but her mother was kind to him, and more important, she was kind to his mother, who was raising a family with far less money than the Foscarinis. So when Elisabetta comes to see him at the Questura, telling him she's worried about her daughter, Flora, a veterinarian, Brunetti decides to look into it unofficially. Flora's husband, Enrico, is an accountant, and apparently he's been acting funny lately and told Flora it could be dangerous if people found out about something having to do with his work. Enrico helped Elisabetta's husband, Bruno, set up a charity several years earlier, and since then he's been working for a number of small clients. With the help of the usual crew—Commissario Claudia Griffoni, Ispettore Lorenzo Vianello, and the crafty secretary Signorina Elettra Zorzi, who Brunetti is finally prepared to admit (to himself) actually breaks the law in her pursuit of information—Brunetti sets out to interview Enrico's clients and the people involved in Bruno's charity. Then Flora finds her clinic broken into and a dog injured: Is it a warning? This book is classic Leon: Brunetti is less focused on any actual crime than on figuring out whether some other unknown crime has been committed, whether he himself is doing something wrong by using official resources on an unofficial investigation, whether the ends of finding information he needs justifies Signorina Elletra's shadowy means of procuring it: "His opinion of that, he knew, had changed in the last few years, and he had grown more suspicious of the desire to expand the limits of the permissible."
Still the next best thing to moving to Venice.Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5940-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
