Acceptable action. Vague villainy. Intriguing milieu.
Even though he’s a Bow Street Runner, Matthew Hawkwood can get caught up in international intrigue.
The dashingly mysterious Hawkwood is entirely suitable as a Regency-era James Bond. Hawkwood’s reputation for intelligence and bravery earned him a spot working for the chief magistrate, James Read, at the Bow Street Public Office. He’s a Runner, a top-level investigator, tackling the toughest assignments. Even though Bonaparte is still messing about on the continent, Hawkwood, a veteran of the famed 95th Rifles in Wellington’s Peninsular War, needed assignment elsewhere because he killed the son of an aristocrat in a duel. Now Hawkwood has been assigned to find the pair of highwaymen who killed a Royal Navy courier outside of London, but there’s more afoot, and Hawkwood doesn’t get all the story. McGee (Ratcatcher, 2006, etc.) decorates his adventure with historical personages and incidents, including the American Robert Fulton’s attempt to sell the British or the French, or both, a “submersible” to deliver a “torpedo” capable of sinking a ship of the line. There are the requisite good guys, including a patriotic clockmaker; an appropriate number of traitors among the aristocracy and the admiralty; and a beauty to be bedded, Catherine de Varesne, a French woman posing as a refugee royalist while working to further the emperor’s ambitions. The story is slow to come together, although pleasantly intriguing in atmosphere, but seemingly lacking one big bad villain for the reader to want to see drawn and quartered. The derring-do is close to standard, and McGee’s characterizations are easy to buy into, especially well-sketched minor players like Nathaniel Jago, Hawkwood’s sergeant from his days in the 95th, and Ezra Twigg, Read’s never-to-be-outwitted assistant. The best of the writing, however, comes through McGee’s capacity for rendering Regency-era London, from the street corner God-botherers to the ubiquitous packs of feral children to the footpads and ne’er-do-wells lurking in the grimiest corners of cesspools like St. Giles Rookery.
Acceptable action. Vague villainy. Intriguing milieu.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60598-368-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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