The groundwork is well-laid for future Pirio Kasparov adventures.
Perfume heiress turns unwilling sleuth in Elo’s suspense series launch.
Pirio Kasparov is learning scent sense from her irascible father, who still runs the Boston-based perfume empire founded by Pirio’s late mother after the family emigrated from Russia. Although she expects to inherit the business one day, a hefty allowance and flexible work schedule allow her plenty of time for extracurricular activities, including going on a lobstering trip with her friend Ned Rizzo aboard his new boat, the Molly Jones. Their outing proves disastrous when, although they are nowhere near a shipping lane, the giant hull of a freighter cleaves the smaller craft in two, killing Ned and leaving Pirio drifting on a board in the freezing Atlantic. She is rescued, and the fact that she survived in cold water much longer than average, without succumbing to hypothermia, has elicited the interest of the U.S. Navy, which wants to study her. But she has little time to be a guinea pig for her country: She has her hands full with Ned’s son, Noah, and Noah’s unreliable, alcoholic mother, Thomasina, Ned’s ex-girlfriend. Clues unearthed during one of Thomasina’s drunken escapades fan Pirio’s vague suspicion into a full-blown conviction that Ned’s death was no accident. Apparently, Ned purchased the Molly Jones for $1 from his former employer, a mega-fishing concern called Ocean Catch. A chance encounter with an Ocean Catch insider leads to another startling revelation: Before suddenly leaving (or being fired?), Ned had crewed on the giant fishing trawler Sea Wolf. That boat’s crew was receiving periodic, off-the-books cash bonuses despite hauling in a minimal amount of legal catch. Was the Sea Wolf hauling contraband? Had Ocean Catch, or someone else, tried to buy Ned’s silence with the gift of a lobster boat? Who stood to gain by his death? Elo’s lively style and the vivid characters lend credence and heft to an original, if ungainly, conspiracy-thriller plot.
The groundwork is well-laid for future Pirio Kasparov adventures.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-01565-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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