An engaging, suspenseful novel that combines an intriguing murder mystery with heaps of historical information.
A riveting mystery set in New York City in 1765 on the eve of the Stamp Act.
Thomas Dordrecht, a young, aspiring businessman, returns home to New York after a two-year journey through Europe. He almost immediately bumps into old friend Marinus Willett, who talks about the impending Stamp Act enactment, which would tax Colonial residents for any piece of printed paper they use, and the unrest it has caused. Willett also tells him about a group of anti-Royalists, including himself, who have banded together under the name “the Sons of Liberty” in order to dispute the tax. As Willett and other Sons of Liberty attempt to convince Dordrecht to join their ranks, he’s also trying to find steady employment. Just as he lands himself what he believes to be a lucrative, if short-term, shipping gig, a young woman, Theodora Colegrove, approaches him and offers to hire him to help her solve the mystery of the recent murder of her 18-year-old stepmother, Artemis Colegrove, found stabbed to death near a handwritten note featuring the slogan of the Sons of Liberty. Because he has some experience solving mysteries, Dordrecht accepts the job and delves into the fascinating, sometimes off-putting, and quite chaotic world of the wealthy, prominent Colegrove family. He also witnesses the mounting tensions between those who support the British government and those who resent it. Carriel’s (If Two Are Dead, 2012, etc.) novel delivers a suspenseful mystery with plenty of twists and turns to keep readers engaged until the truth about the murder is revealed. It has a bounty of vivid characters, from Calpurnia, the Colegroves’ slave, to Dordrecht himself, who’s at the center of this and other, previous historical mysteries. Finally, Carriel does an excellent job of using old-fashioned language to paint a colorful picture of Colonial life during the 18th century. For example, when Dordrecht’s older cousin Charles comments on his still being unmarried, Dordrecht thinks, “Be damned if I need yet another relative interfering in my private affairs! My mother, sisters, aunts—all have been writing in a panic to see me married and encumbered with children….And now this libertine capon—how I wish he’d at least get a new wig!”
An engaging, suspenseful novel that combines an intriguing murder mystery with heaps of historical information.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6482-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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