The only disappointment is that the appropriately lurid cover illustration doesn’t come close to representing any of the...
A year after premiering Gardner’s long-unpublished second case—under the pseudonym A.A. Fair (The Knife Slipped, 2016)—for private investigator Bertha Cool and her operative, Donald Lam, Hard Case reprints the second case for the team that actually made it into print back in 1940—and it’s a doozy.
Over 20 years ago, Dr. James C. Lintig and his wife, Amelia Rosa Lintig, disappeared from Oakview, California, in the middle of a heated divorce suit in which each accused the other of infidelity. Now a client demurely identifying himself as Mr. Smith wants Cool and Lam to track down the missing woman, though he’s less interested in her presumably still-estranged husband. Arriving in Oakview, Donald quickly develops several promising leads, but some of them lead to the wrong places. His queries attract the attention of a menacing stranger who knocks him out and kidnaps him from his hotel, and for every new item he digs up about Amelia Lintig, he uncovers an unwelcome new tidbit about the client himself, who shows every sign of a self-destructive streak a mile wide—a trait echoed this time by Donald’s boss, whose inability to trust her canny op backfires, leading the duo into a murky area between a town full of crooked politicians and a murder rap. A more detailed summary would give away too much about a tale that depends on a wonderfully pulpy milieu, a breathless pace, and a nested series of surprises so rapid that you hardly have time to get used to each one before Gardner springs the next. By the end, however, you’ll sympathize with Bertha’s complaint that “I’ve ceased to be a detective and become an accomplice” and agree with Donald that “a lot of heat has been turned on.”
The only disappointment is that the appropriately lurid cover illustration doesn’t come close to representing any of the many felonies that actually go down. If they’re looking to please fans, Hard Case could do worse than continue the series till they’ve reprinted every one of the firm’s 29 adventures.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78565-617-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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 2025 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.
