Buckley’s storied heroine (A Perilous Alliance, 2015, etc.) has all too little chance to prove herself in her 14th...
A spy in skirts serves in Her Majesty’s secret service, Tudor style.
In February 1577, 40-ish, thrice-widowed Ursula Blanchard is giving a wedding for her young ward when she receives an important guest: William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and assigner of secret errands on behalf of the queen. Unlike past tasks, he assures Ursula, this one poses no danger to her. She has merely to go to Edinburgh and deliver a highly confidential letter, thence to a remote Yorkshire manor, Stonemoor House, to collect a rare book of astronomical observations. As a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, who is also her half sister, the product of Henry VIII’s infidelity when he was married to Anne Boleyn, Ursula can hardly decline, but she can ask Burghley why he isn’t sending a Queen’s Messenger. It turns out Burghley has already dispatched two—including Ursula’s good friend and one-time suitor—but they never returned. Despite this less than reassuring news and her resident soothsayer’s warning, the first part of Ursula’s errand goes smoothly enough. In fact, it takes Burghley longer to explain the letter, which concerns a plot surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots, than for Ursula to deliver it. The next task requires Ursula and her retinue to brave a blizzard to get to Stonemoor, an informal convent. During their stay, Ursula’s personal tirewoman Fran discovers a secret sign that at least one of the Queen’s Messengers has been there and was in danger. So Ursula and her friends are more than happy to pay for the book and head home. But a strange fact about the book (quite apart from the curse on it) and a piece of gruesome evidence make Ursula turn her party back to Stonemoor and the danger she’s feared all along.
Buckley’s storied heroine (A Perilous Alliance, 2015, etc.) has all too little chance to prove herself in her 14th adventure: too many of the critical scenes are either narrated to her or take place offstage.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78029-091-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Creme de la Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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