An enjoyable romp through the drawing rooms, theaters, and docks of early-19th-century Philadelphia.
Sensitive Edgar Allan Poe and his mysterious comrade C. Augustus Dupin team up with Poe’s wife and an eccentric taxidermist in Street’s (Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster, 2016) second novel.
When Miss Helena Loddiges, last met during Poe’s investigation into his family’s sordid history in London, turns up on his Philadelphia doorstep with a message from a dead raven and concerns about a murdered friend, Poe can’t turn her away. She’s a welcome diversion, really, from his obsessive concerns about his wife Sissy’s health. Despite Helena’s outrageous hobby and sense of fashion, her story about Andrew Mathews, a bird collector, and his son Jeremiah, both of whom had recently traveled to Peru and then ended up dead, has the ring of truth, which seems confirmed when she is abducted. The heart of this mystery, and the most striking descriptions and imagery in the novel, revolve around birds; Andrew and Jeremiah kept journals of their South American discoveries, beautifully illustrated, and some of the pictures seem to be clues. Then there is the legend of “the jewel of Peru,” a magnificent emerald buried in a tomb. Poe and Dupin must confront a formidable professor, several criminal priests, some violent nativists, and their old nemeses, George and Rowena Reynolds, to save Ms. Loddiges and discover the truth about the jewel. The mystery—in fact, the whole novel—offers more shiny surface than deep complexity, but it’s fun. The descriptions of the birds and the focus on exotic places differentiate it from Street’s first Poe/Dupin novel, and while there isn’t as much need for “ratiocination,” there is also less depressive, self-condemning narration from Poe. It feels a bit like old Indiana Jones returning for The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—a bit ridiculous but entertaining all the same.
An enjoyable romp through the drawing rooms, theaters, and docks of early-19th-century Philadelphia.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-667-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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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