An entertaining whodunit that finds plenty of toxic rot in a seemingly wholesome setting.
Swiss detectives dig into the cutthroat world of organic farming in Hays’ twisty murder mystery series starter.
The city of Bern—Switzerland’s clean, orderly capital—has a rare moment of mayhem when a policeman named Jonas Pauli is accused of clubbing Simon Etter to death during a riot. Det. Giuliana Linder is assigned to investigate the incident and subtly pressured by police brass to find another culprit to take the heat off Jonas, who swears he hit Simon only once, lightly, and that the second, fatal blow must have been struck by someone else. Giuliana feels torn by the case: She’d like to exonerate Jonas, but she’s also primed to believe the worst because of her immersion in Bern’s counterculture as a student, her leftist journalist husband Ueli’s distrust of all police (except her, she hopes), and her 15-year-old daughter’s arrest for rioting on the night of the murder. Pauli’s story gains credence when Giuliana turns up evidence that Simon was a drug dealer who might have had enemies. But the case takes a swerve when Giuliana’s colleague Renzo Donatelli links it to the murder of an organic farmer named Frank Schwab, who was found beaten, smothered to death, and drenched in pesticide—a substance the doctrinaire Frank never allowed on his farm. The prime suspect is a suspicious young man known as Simu, who was often around Frank’s farm—and turns out to be someone connected to Giuliana’s other case. The plot thickens as Giuliana ties Simon to an Albanian drug kingpin and Renzo probes the harsh economics of organic farming. Meanwhile, Giuliana and the handsome Renzo struggle to fend off their intensifying desire for each other as their marriages fray.
This first installment of Hays’ Linder and Donatelli mystery series steeps readers in intricate procedural details, such as turning horrific photos of a dead victim’s bloated face into recognizable artist’s sketches; piecing together timelines to verify alibis; and even sussing out the niceties of organic certification and agricultural subsidies. Hays’ plotting is first-rate as she keeps the sleuthing believable and offers up earned revelations, which make sense of the clues even when they go in unexpected directions. Her punchy, evocative prose looks beneath Switzerland’s veneer of antiseptic quaintness to find grungy atmospherics, as in a description of an informant: “A piercing through the nasal septum reminded her of snot dangling from each nostril, and tattoos of thorny vines covered what she could see of his arms. Steel plugs had stretched his earlobes into gaping tunnels.” The author is equally good at painting the inner worlds of her characters, from overworked cops and worried parents to fog-brained criminals: “Christ, he was blitzed....The shots of schnapps—that’d been his mistake. Still, he’d managed; he’d managed everything. Things were set up the way he wanted them. And if he’d messed up somewhere…well, it could be fixed. Later.” The result is an engrossing page-turner.
An entertaining whodunit that finds plenty of toxic rot in a seemingly wholesome setting.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64506-046-8
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
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