A possibly forged French masterpiece provides the battleground for an archly amusing game of cat and mouse. Charles Vermeille is the world’s premier expert on the work of 17th-century master Claude Lorrain. From his eminent perch at the College de France, the widower Vermeille—arrogant, imperious, and plainspoken—hands down edicts on the authenticity of Lorrain’s oft-copied work whose authority is beyond appeal. But all is not well with Charles. Soon after returning from a conference at which he declined to fall under the well-exercised spell of British preservationist Jane Caldwell, he begins to receive photographs of his adored son Jean-Louis. The photos themselves are innocuous—the young man is surfing, playing tennis, reading on a balcony—but their regular arrival, postmarked from all over Europe and unaccompanied by a word of explanation or demand, soon comes to seem sinister. Nor does a panicky visit to Berkeley, where Jean-Louis, hale and happy, is studying for an M.B.A., alleviate Charles’s fears or stem the ominous flow of photos, one of them now accompanied by a newspaper clipping recounting the Onassis heir’s death. Who could be tormenting Charles in such an exquisitely oblique way? Reviewing and rejecting all his obvious enemies (whom his agonized list rather implausibly restricts to three), Charles can only assume that his ordeal has something to do with his expertise in Lorrain. But Fiechter, in a plot closely reminiscent of his Death by Publication (1995), has already broadly hinted that the scorned Jane is the perpetrator. In an impassioned bid to get revenge on her own distant father who ignored and undervalued her even before paralysis made him a vegetable—a father she can’t help seeing in Charles’she’s concocted a cleverly symmetrical scheme to capitalize on Charles’s love for his son. What that scheme is, and how it fares, are matters best left to Fiechter’s telling. Slight, elegant, and urbane, with a malicious final twist that’s as perfectly effervescent as chilled champagne.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55970-430-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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