Shallow and snarky, though the concept is clever.
Humpty Dumpty fell off his wall, and the Nursery Crimes Division opened an investigation.
Welcome to the beginning of a whole new wave of mysteries soon to be thickening bookstore shelves everywhere, because if Fforde (The Well of Lost Plots, 2003, etc.) knows one thing, it’s that for every bit of innovation you must give the audience at least another of cliché. Nursery rhymes have come to life in his latest, but the crimes are just as grotesquely complex, the press as vainglorious, the coppers divided between greedy attention-seekers and humble head-down heroes, as in the real world. The Reading police department is unnaturally enamored with DCI Friedland Chymes, who not only always gets his man but is also able to solve crimes in a snappy yet dramatic fashion that makes fantastic copy when he writes them up for the magazines. Jack Spratt, stuck over in NCD (Nursery Crimes Division), has hardly the reputation of Friedland—there’s that awkward business of bungling the Three Little Pigs case—and Spratt’s newest problem is the untimely death of one very large egg. Humpty Dumpty just loved to sit on his wall, but he’s been done in in a rather nasty fashion. With a scrappy new partner at his side (if she’s good enough, she might soon push for a promotion to Official Sidekick), Spratt digs into Humpty’s messy life: the divorce, the dozens upon dozens of ex-girlfriends and jilted lovers, the poorly thought-out investment schemes, etc. Fforde lays on his erudition with a trowel, slathering literary references all over his rote detective story. Of course, it being rote is part of the point, as Fforde’s trying to deconstruct the whole genre. While the effect is at first hilarious and ingenious, eventually the charm wears off.
Shallow and snarky, though the concept is clever.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03423-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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