A rich, nuanced tale, ideal for beach reading, just as long as the beach doesn’t harbor too many shadows.
Superb, spooky whodunit from the Swedish couple who write as Kepler (The Nightmare, 2012, etc.).
Considering the nasty things that the likes of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and now Kepler have been turning up underneath Sweden’s soft, pine-clad, liberal veneer, it seems surprising that the entire country has not emigrated to safer climes. Some cannot, though, notably the young women who live at a home for wayward youth in the country’s chilly north—a place where Very Bad Things are about to happen. The mayhem begins with the extremely graphic murder of a ward nurse (“She cannot see her body lying on the floor or the dog sneaking in and tentatively lapping the blood leaking from her crushed head”), and that’s just the start. Enter world-weary detective Joona Linna, whom one of the girls tellingly calls “the Finn” and who really shouldn’t be on the case; he’s in trouble, it seems, for having leaked information to a leftist group back home in Stockholm, and in any event, he’s a little shellshocked, “searching for that mental stillness that will allow him to observe and not give in to the impulse to look away.” There’s plenty to look away from, though Joona immediately sees things that others do not, even as one of his informants sees a malevolent ghost in the hallways. But why would someone, real or supernatural, go to all the work of killing a nurse and trying to pin it on a troubled kid? Ah, cherchez la chose: Someone wants something, and that someone figures in the worst of Joona’s dreams and case files. As the story unfolds, the mad look sane and the sane look mad, and Kepler’s novel turns from simple mystery to an intriguing, satisfying blend of police procedural and horror story.
A rich, nuanced tale, ideal for beach reading, just as long as the beach doesn’t harbor too many shadows.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-29866-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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