Series fans will appreciate the neighborhood feel in this return to Frog Ledge (Custom Baked Murder, 2016, etc.). Newly...
When Santa is suddenly struck down, residents of a small town try to figure out who among them has been bad or good.
Back from a rare foray from her little community, Kristan “Stan” Connor is ready to indulge in the spirit of the season with the other residents of Frog Ledge. At the annual Christmas parade, Stan’s mood changes from excitement to terror when she learns that the parade has been cut short after Santa died en route. Fellow celebrant Miss Viv is frantic to figure out what happened given that the role of Santa was scheduled to have been played by Seamus McGee, her sometime boyfriend. Though Seamus, the mischievous but lovable uncle to Stan’s own boyfriend, Jake, isn’t an official resident, Stan feels like he’s practically family. Doubling the family ties, Jake’s sister, state trooper Jessie Pasquale, leads the investigation into the death. She begins by identifying the deceased Santa not as Seamus but as little-known resident Harold Dewey. Stan’s pet food business, Pawsitively Organic, is so successful that she has extra time to do a little investigating of her own, and she develops strong hunches that Harold was mistaken for Seamus and that his death is connected to a copy of the Book of Kells that’s recently gone missing. Could Seamus have been enough of a risk-taker to get himself involved with the ultimate heist? Stan’s insistence translates into meddling, and she quickly gets on Jessie’s bad side, which gets her on Jake’s bad side, which gets her wondering whether she’ll solve the murder but still end up alone.
Series fans will appreciate the neighborhood feel in this return to Frog Ledge (Custom Baked Murder, 2016, etc.). Newly arrived readers may struggle to summon the concentration required by the enormous cast of characters Mugavero cycles through.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0021-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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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