Florio’s flawed, complex, compelling heroine faces challenges that are both gut-wrenchingly difficult and all too common...
Can a Montana reporter sunk deep into despair after the death of her husband ever climb out of the pit she’s dug for herself?
Not even the evident distress of her 8-year-old daughter, Margaret, and her beloved dog, Bub, have cut the vicious cycle of pills that gives Lola Wicks relief from the pain of losing her husband, Charlie, in an eco-terrorist bombing six months earlier (Reservations, 2017). Margaret has just enough Native American blood to be considered part of the Blackfoot tribe, and after Charlie's death, the "aunties" of the tribe "swept in...cooking and cleaning and taking care of Margaret, and Lola, too." But now Jan, Lola's best friend and colleague on the local paper in Magpie, is driving her to an intervention: she and the aunties have realized they’re only enabling Lola in behavior so destructive that a social worker has considered removing Margaret from her home. Jan has arranged for Lola to go to Salt Lake City to write a human interest story for a religious magazine about Mormon adoptions; the editor of the magazine, Donovan Munro, has arranged for her to interview the Shumway family, who had adopted a 10-year-old Vietnamese boy some years earlier to add to their household of five daughters. Even before Lola arrives at her appointment with the Shumways, though, their neighbor Sariah Ballard is murdered and Trang, also called Frank, is arrested. The Ballards and Shumways are best friends, and Frank was engaged to Sariah Ballard's daughter Tynslee, though they're both still in high school. Struggling to function without her pills, Lola scores a new supply from a nervous boy she later finds is her editor Donovan Munro’s son, Malachi. Since all the teens know each other, Lola is convinced they’ll be her best source if only she can get them to open up about their secrets. It takes a trip all the way to Vietnam for Lola to uncover some of these secrets, and even then she gets the answer wrong. But her hunt for the truth starts her on the road to recovery.
Florio’s flawed, complex, compelling heroine faces challenges that are both gut-wrenchingly difficult and all too common today. Her determination to rise above them raises this convoluted tale far above the crowd.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5053-8
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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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