Rees and Lydia would have made better progress if they hadn’t stopped to eat every few pages and Kuhns (Cradle to Grave,...
An 18th-century weaver/detective steps into a wasp's nest of family intrigue when he takes on his fourth case.
More than 100 years after the witch trials, Salem, Massachusetts, is a thriving port second only to Boston, and its leading citizens have grown rich in trade with the Orient. Will Rees has come to buy imported fabric, and he lingers to watch the funeral procession of Anstiss, the invalid wife of merchant Jacob Boothe. Rees witnesses an ugly scene: Boothe’s estranged in-laws, a prosperous whaling family, blame him and his younger daughter, Peggy, for Anstiss’ death. Rees is on his way home to the District of Maine when his friend Stephen “Twig” Eaton fetches him back to Salem. Jacob Boothe has been stabbed to death, and Twig’s sweetheart, the Boothes’ slave Xenobia, stands accused. After Rees helps exonerate Xenobia, William Boothe, Jacob’s older son, retains the weaver to solve the murder. The Boothes are not a happy family. Peggy is angry with her father for displacing her as unofficial bookkeeper and turning the accounts over to William. The other son, Matthew, is a wastrel who seems to care less about his father than about the dramatic society he belongs to, along with one of his brothers-in-law. The other Boothe daughter’s main concern is that scandal doesn’t disrupt her upcoming wedding. But scandal there is when the cousin of Jacob’s rumored mistress is strangled. Rees thinks a woman’s sympathetic touch might help and sends for his wife, Lydia. Together they try to make sense of hidden merchandise in Salem’s vast tunnel system, a piratical French sea captain, the mystery of a ship that once belonged to the Boothe family, and a strange tattoo that could solve the Salem murders.
Rees and Lydia would have made better progress if they hadn’t stopped to eat every few pages and Kuhns (Cradle to Grave, 2014, etc.) hadn’t described every bite, along with numerous other historical details. Still, the Reeses make an amiable sleuthing team in a post–Revolutionary War setting.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06702-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
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
© 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.
