Despite some serious problems with pacing—successive mysteries and solutions seem to pop up and recede at the author’s...
Darko Dawson (Murder at Cape Three Points, 2014, etc.) is seconded to Obuasi, far from his home base in Accra, just in time to catch a particularly brutal murder.
Dawson should know better than to celebrate his recent promotion to Chief Inspector, which turns out to be just one more reason he’d be the perfect person to send to Ghana’s Ashanti region when the ailing local CID chief dies. Scarcely has he formed his first impressions of his inefficient and insubordinate constables and Ata Longdon, his bullying commander, than word comes that mineworker Kudzo Gablah and his crew have discovered the body of Bao Liu, their exacting boss, buried in one of the mines they’re working. Bao’s brother, Wei Liu, who moves and washes the corpse, ostensibly to avoid shocking new widow Lian Liu, is the obvious suspect, but once he proves an alibi, Dawson must look elsewhere. He finds a powerful motive in Bao’s unrequited flirtation with Comfort, the girlfriend of neighboring farmer Amos Okoh, whose brother, Yaw Okoh, swore vengeance after a quarrel between Amos and Bao left the former dead and the latter unpunished. Despite procuring a confession to Bao’s murder, Dawson is still dissatisfied. That’s just as well, because a Ghanaian task force decides that these private crimes are less important than the corruption introduced to the region by the gold mines illegally owned and operated by Chinese interlopers like the Liu brothers. Dawson finds himself caught between warring factions—not just the good guys and the bad guys, but the good guys and the not-so-good guys.
Despite some serious problems with pacing—successive mysteries and solutions seem to pop up and recede at the author’s whim—Quartey presents tonic news for Americans who assume that Europeans were the most calamitous force ever to strike Ghana.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-630-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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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