Come for the entertaining, well-crafted mystery, stay for the thoughtful critique of academia.
When a promising student at the University of Georgia is found dead, a former detective searches for answers: Do all the fingers point at his professor, the start of a witch hunt, or the path to the truth?
Marlitt Kaplan has been itching to solve a case. For months, she’s been a pariah to the Athens PD after she refused to play by the rules while investigating a fraternity, resigned in disgrace, and damaged her relationship with her former partner and closest friend, Teddy. The whispers about her “assaulting a fraternity member” or having a “gender-coded psychotic break” only added fuel to the fire—literally: Someone broke into her house and set it ablaze. Now she’s living with her parents and bored senseless. That is, until the Athens PD takes Professor Verena Sobek into the station for questioning. Verena’s student Ethan Haddock was discovered dead from an apparent suicide, and rumors are flying that he and Verena had been sleeping together. Verena's facing a Title IX investigation, and Marlitt’s mother, her colleague in the German Department, begs her daughter to prove Verena’s innocence. Marlitt’s unease about working on behalf of an accused professor is no match for her desire to investigate again, so she steps into Ethan's world. Soon, she discovers that her secret wish that the case had been a murder investigation may be coming true. Family secrets, rocky romances, a potentially rogue officer, and vindictive students teem in Nossett’s sophomore novel. Despite a few opening chapters weighed down by exposition, the novel succeeds as a page-turning mystery full of potential suspects, exciting twists, and a few red herrings. Nossett adeptly uses narrative structure to play with readers’ expectations and crafts a mystery that sits in that sweet spot: dropping just enough clues so readers can investigate alongside Marlitt, but not so many that the ending feels predictable. She handles the premise of a former detective trying to prove the innocence of an accused abuser with care. It is no small feat to transform a potentially problematic, black-and-white plot into a thoughtful investigation of the ways academic power structures (and those of law enforcement) fail individuals, but Nossett pulls it off.
Come for the entertaining, well-crafted mystery, stay for the thoughtful critique of academia.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250845351
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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