The slight mystery offers a handy peg for Nesbitt’s latest valentine to the Wyoming frontier he clearly loves.
An aspiring Ohio transplant’s dream of owning his own spread in turn-of-the-century Wyoming is put on hold due to a series of inconvenient murders.
Earl Miner, who owns the Pick, makes no bones about insisting that every man who works for him file a claim to 160 acres under the Homestead Act and then sell it to him so he won’t be troubled by competing ranchers in the Decker Basin. As soon as cowpuncher Reese Hartley bridles at that arrangement, foreman Dick Prentiss gives him his walking papers, and Hartley packs his gear. Lacking any particular plan or destination, Hartley wanders off, encountering what seems to be virtually every woman in town: Pick hand Ben Stillwell’s sweetheart, Bess Ackerman, niece of grain broker Mike Ackerman; Muriel Dulse, a grass widow who also dreams of owning a place despite the tight rein Doyle Treece and the Hudson family, the cousins with whom she lives, keep on her; and Nancy Wisner, a young and flirtatious cousin of the Hudsons. As Nesbitt (Dusk Along the Niobrara, 2019, etc.) shows, however, his most fraught encounters are with aggressive local men who challenge his plan to secure his own land, get physical with him, and invite him to get out of town. While Hartley, who’s a good deal less confrontational than either his adversaries or most Western heroes, is still pondering what to do next, Ben Stillwell vanishes and then turns up choked to death, followed by Nancy Wisner. When Treece accuses Blue, a mysterious newcomer to the community, of killing Nancy, blacksmith/marshal Jock Mosby arrests and jails him, but Hartley doesn’t think that’s the end of the story, and of course he’s right.
The slight mystery offers a handy peg for Nesbitt’s latest valentine to the Wyoming frontier he clearly loves.Pub Date: May 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4328-6832-1
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
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