Torturously contrived, wildly improbable woman-in-peril/legal procedural set in a darkly perverse post-Communist Moscow, from mystically inclined lawyer-author Podrug (Frost of Heaven, 1992). Predictably pretty San Francisco prosecutor Lara Patrick opens her morning mail to find a grainy, unmarked black-and-white photograph, postmarked from Moscow. The picture shows what appears to be the mutilated corpse of Lara's American antiwar activist mother, who, according to what Lara was told as a child, died in an automobile accident in what was then the Soviet Union after she had ingested too much LSD. Lara, who was born in Russia but raised in America and who still speaks fluent Russian, hops the next available plane to Moscow, where creepy things quickly begin to happen. At St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square, she falls in with a daft bag-lady who seems to recognize her. Then, as the guide rambles on about Ivan's murderous rampages, Lara barely escapes an attack by a demented priest. She bribes various perverted Slavic types for information about how her mother really died. Just about everybody she meets drops veiled hints before perishing horribly. Finally, Lara encounters the suave but skeptical Detective Yuri Kirov, passes out in bed with the wealthy Alexi Bova, and finds herself framed for the slasher murder of one of Bova's paramours, Nadia Kolchak. Beyond his relentless, over-the-top depictions of how unabashedly awful Moscow is, Podrug uses Lara to examine the grim severity of the modern Russian legal system, where defendants are presumed guilty and must engineer an almost miraculous manipulation of facts and procedures to escape conviction. Of course, Lara has a willing accomplice in Detective Kirov, who falls in love with her but even so must withhold from her the vile secret surrounding her mother's death until a climax that, thanks to Podrug's penchant for telling more than he shows, remains unconvincing. An interesting examination of alien jurisprudence, overwhelmed by campy melodrama, kinky theatrics, and cartoon violence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-86242-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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