A compelling account of how the toll of war extends far beyond the battlefield.
A World War II widow solves a crime the police would rather ignore.
Loosely following the story of forensic-science pioneer Frances Glessner Lee, Tietjen relates the sad tale of Mabel “Maple” Bishop, a lawyer who moved with her husband, Bill, a physician, to rural Vermont in search of a safer and kinder life than the one they’d had in Boston. After Bill’s death in a field hospital in France, Maple learns that his estate amounts to a meager $12.67. Bill’s willingness to treat Elderberry’s sick whether or not they could pay had left his practice in the red. Despite her husband’s generosity, the people of Elderberry still regard Maple as an outsider, and, on top of that, no one will hire a woman to work as a lawyer. Maple has gotten to know Ben Crenshaw, owner of the local hardware store, while buying supplies to make meticulously crafted dollhouses. When he suggests she might want to display her dollhouses in his store and sell them, her hobby becomes a means of supporting herself. But while delivering her first sale to local farmer’s wife Angela Wallace, Maple makes a grim discovery: Angela’s husband, Elijah, hanging from a noose in his barn. The police dismiss Elijah’s death as an accident, but Maple believes otherwise. Now her dollhouses take on a third life: from pastime to livelihood to crime-fighting tool. To prod the police into action, Maple recreates the crime scene in miniature to show how an accidental death was impossible. Her efforts are wasted on Sheriff Sam Scott, but Kenny, a young officer-in-training, takes an interest and joins forces with Maple to discover the truth. Firm, uncompromising, and sometimes rubbing her neighbors the wrong way, Maple sees details others overlook and, guided by an unwavering moral compass, pursues questions the police have left open. Tietjen gives all of her characters rich, full inner lives as they interact in ways that are both aesthetically and morally complex.
A compelling account of how the toll of war extends far beyond the battlefield.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781639107186
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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 top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
