More interested in the heroine’s amatory adventures and future home than in a piddling murder or two.
The death of her father opens both new heartaches and new opportunities for surgical resident Dr. Emily Hartford.
A providential unannounced visit on her way back to Chicago puts Emily on the scene in time to call an ambulance for Dr. Robert Hartford, the veteran coroner of Freeport County, Michigan, but although the prompt medical attention he receives enables him to tell his daughter, “The day…your mom died…I was meeting…a woman,” it isn’t enough to save his life. No sooner has Emily, shocked at the death of her long-estranged father so soon after they’d tentatively reconciled (The Coroner, 2018), arranged for his funeral than County Sheriff Nick Larson begs her to identify a collection of bones that’s been unearthed in the excavation for a new housing development. Nick arranges for University of Michigan forensic anthropologist Dr. Charles Payton to make the identification, and he confirms Nick’s hunch about the bones: They’re human, they’re female, and in life they belonged to Sandi Parkman, a high school student who went missing 10 years ago. Now Emily finds herself pressed from every side imaginable. Brandon, the Chicago surgeon she just broke up with, wants to go through with their wedding and indicates that he’s willing to bend over backward to accommodate her. Dr. Claiborne, her retiring supervisor in Chicago, wants to know if she and Brandon are interested in taking over his practice. Freeport County commissioner Hank Wurthers wants to know if she intends to stand for election to coroner in her father’s place. On top of everything else, her father’s will reveals that she has a half sister, Anna Johnson, whom she’s never heard of, much less met. Despite her grief, Emily disguises herself on two separate occasions to visit the Silver Slipper, where Sandi’s kid sister, Tiffani, interrupts her pole dancing long enough to intimate that Nick killed her sister.
More interested in the heroine’s amatory adventures and future home than in a piddling murder or two.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64385-122-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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