Not as surprising or carefully structured as Bingham’s striking debut, but his remote, unquenchable heroine makes her stand...
A pair of murders five years apart forms the basis of a fact-based sophomore case for DC Fiona Griffiths, of the South Wales CID, that’s just as intense as her first (Talking to the Dead, 2012).
Since Fiona is on hand to discover Mary Jane Langton’s severed leg in the late Elsie Williams’ chest freezer, she feels a special attachment to the victim, who disappeared in 2005. But her colleagues soon challenge her privileged position by turning up not only other sections of Mary’s corpse (though it’s reserved to Fiona to find her head), but, even more disturbingly, a hand and other body parts more recently associated with Ali el-Khalifi, a lecturer at the Cardiff School of Engineering whose expertise turns out to have connected him to a more sinister sideline. As everyone runs around trying to connect the two murders under Operation Abacus, which the cops promptly nickname Operation Stirfry, Fiona, shunted onto the Khalifi investigation by imperious, ill-tempered DI Rhiannon Watkins, is the only one to sense the more pressing connection between Khalifi’s murder and the suicide of Mark Mortimer, who slit his wrist with a piece of a broken bottle after he was jailed as the most inept drug smuggler in Welsh history. In fact, it’s Fiona, whose Cotard’s syndrome prevents her from feeling all kinds of emotions and sometimes even sensing feelings in her own body, who has what it takes to close the case and deliver some of the most memorably staccato narration in the genre.
Not as surprising or carefully structured as Bingham’s striking debut, but his remote, unquenchable heroine makes her stand apart from every one of her procedural brothers and sisters.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53376-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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