A twisty, entertaining whodunit with sharp sleuthing and a lot of heart.
Private eye Dee Rommel returns to investigate an apparently murderous rich family in this knotty mystery series entry.
This second outing finds Dee working for 11-year-old Zar Sants-Mekler, who wants her to prove that his mother, Agnes Sants, a wealthy heir and astrologer, didn’t kill their gardener, who was found dead of a gunshot wound in their backyard. Complicating the case is Zar’s insistence that the crime be solved in just nine days so that he and Agnes can make their Thanksgiving flight to Vienna; complicating it further is Agnes’ statement to the Portland, Maine, police in which she confessed to the murder. Dee’s crusty boss, Gordy, wants to drop this turkey, but other developments make Dee question what seems an open-and-shut case: Unknown assailants viciously beat Zar’s father, Tobias Mekler, causing him to be put into an induced coma; an acquaintance of Gordy’s, involved in questionable real estate dealings with Mekler’s company, becomes part of the mystery; and Dee’s car is vandalized by two criminals who seem vaguely mixed up with the family. Dee delves into Agnes’ astrological community and is skeptical of its claims, but Agnes’ colleague does an astrological chart that has a weird prescience. The PI also gets a fix on the odd denizens of the Sants-Mekler household, including the frosty, secretive housekeeper, Dolba; Zar’s bullying teenage brother Fletcher; and his even crueler eldest brother, Toby Junior, a charismatic but menacing practitioner of Brazilian jujitsu who’s hell-bent on selling off Agnes’ heirlooms. As Dee sorts through this tangle, she weathers nightmarish flashbacks to the crime that caused her to lose the lower part of one leg and butts heads with Robbie Donato, the handsome police detective working the murder, with whom she had a brief romantic connection before he took up with the glamorous news anchor now carrying his child.
Selbo sets her yarn in an atmospheric panorama of Portland, where, hidden behind a quaint veneer, poverty is plain: “Ratty sofas weigh down broken porches. Beer and soda cans have gathered into thick piles against fractured curbs. Empty lots sport tall, brown weeds, most have trapped trash in their thorns.” Her prose is punchy and evocative, as when she describes the aftermath of Tobias’ assault, with “his bashed head splotched with coagulating globs of vital fluid.” The novel is also stocked with vivid, sharply drawn characters. Zar, in particular, is a compelling creation: a nerdy know-it-all—named after the soothsaying prophet of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra—who’s forever spouting trivia that often sounds inane (“Do you know what gout is? It’s when the joints in your body get full of too many crystals made of uric acid or something and you swell up and your big toe can hurt a lot”) but sometimes turns out to have subtler meaning. Dee herself is shown to be a complex, prickly hero living with disability and harboring a deep curiosity and empathy beneath a hard-bitten exterior. Readers will happily follow her down many rabbit holes.
A twisty, entertaining whodunit with sharp sleuthing and a lot of heart.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950627-55-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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