Nonpareil jockey/suspense writer Dick Francis’s son Felix, who coauthored his late father’s last four novels (Crossfire, 2010, etc.), turns in a solo performance fully worthy of the family name.
There’s nothing like having a colleague murdered in front of you to turn an inoffensive financial advisor into a freelance investigator. Nicholas Foxton has both a more pressing incentive than most self-made heroes, since his friendship with Herb Kovak, of Lyall & Black, was just beginning to deepen when Herb was executed by three shots minutes before the Grand National was to be run, and better qualifications, since he has both the computer skills to follow the money and the physique of a former jockey sidelined when he broke his neck seven years ago. Doctors have forbidden Nick from riding again, but they can’t stop him in his unexpected capacity as Herb’s executor and sole heir from looking into his estate, and it’s one unholy mess. Herb, a transplanted American, owed thousands of pounds on a dozen credit cards and had only a nominal savings account. With some help from Herb’s twin sister Sherri, however, Nick realizes that Herb also had a large income stream he kept carefully off the books. Meantime, Col. Jolyon Roberts, a client at Lyall & Black, has asked Nick to look into a hospital the Roberts Family Trust had supposedly built in Bulgaria—a hospital the Colonel’s nephew Ben claims doesn’t exist. And Nick’s artist girlfriend Claudia, who’s been suspiciously distant lately, thoroughly alarms him when she tells him the reason why. As the plot unfolds, Nick will fall into the hands of his enemies, come to terms with a dark family secret and get one more chance to climb on a horse and ride him to glory. If all this sounds familiar, Francis fans can be assured that, like Nick’s climactic mount, they’re in reassuringly expert hands.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15747-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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