Compassion and authenticity bolster the anemic suspense.
The fourth in a series (Birds of a Feather, 2004, etc.) of class-conscious World War II–era whodunits.
On a beastly cold winter day, London artist Nicholas Bassington-Hope is found dead in his gallery, where he had been erecting scaffolding for the mysterious pièce de résistance of his upcoming show. Scotland Yards rules Nick’s death an accident and closes the case. But his twin sister, Georgina, is convinced that there was foul play and hires psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs to look into the matter. Maisie spends the next several days acquainting herself with Nick’s high-brow family, his loyal friends, and the rich patrons who were interested in buying his work. She learns that Nick, while universally respected as a talented artist, also produced a body of evocative and even offensive work. Did his latest masterpiece, which he had kept hidden from even close family and friends, have the potential to shock and anger someone into murder? Other characters in his life are also suspicious. Nick’s older sister Nolly is a war widow who disapproved of his lifestyle and seems overly interested in his assets. His younger brother Harry is a derelict gambler who had gotten involved with the wrong crowd—one Scotland Yard is trailing far closer than Nick’s potential homicide. And even Georgina, a writer whom Maisie learns has been involved in a secret affair with Nick’s American patron—had recently been particularly competitive with her twin. As Maisie flits among the moneyed gentry of the Bassington-Hopes, she is all too aware of the growing chasm between their world and the rest of London. Her own assistant, Billy, can hardly pay for a doctor for his dying toddler, and his East End neighbors and relatives who came back from the war in France are largely jobless and homeless. Though the actual mystery is not as intricate Maisie’s previous adventures, Winspear makes up for it with careful, detailed treatment of the time period and its social issues.
Compassion and authenticity bolster the anemic suspense.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7898-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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