An irresistible popcorn chaser despite its slender mystery.
A sixth case for UCLA preservationist/film detective Valentino involves him more closely than any of its predecessors in the preservation and exhibition of an actual film.
Not that the film in question, Bleak Street, a 1957 production at RKO, then in the twilight of its own existence, is a real-life film. But Estleman’s loving enthusiasm for films noirs, efficiently channeled through his hero, will have you cheering for its resurrection when mysterious hotelier and philanthropist Ignacio Bozal swaps his copy of Greed for the only surviving print of Bleak Street and donates it to UCLA and rooting for Valentino’s attempts to get the print screened, which UCLA PR rep Henry Anklemire conditions on his ability to generate buzz around a 63-year-old film. The obvious angle to work is the disappearance of Van Oliver, the film’s star, shortly after the production wrapped. But as Valentino observes, “when it came to cold cases, Van Oliver’s was forty below zero.” And other complications quickly spring up along the way. Valentino’s longtime adversary Teddie Goodman announces that her boss, Supernova founder Mark David Turkus, has acquired the copyright to Bleak Street, forbidding UCLA or anyone else from screening it. A closer look at the print Bozal turned over indicates that it isn’t even Bleak Street but five reels of junk footage. And Valentino’s attempt to interview Oliver’s co-star, Ivy Lane, comes to grief when she dies the night before in a twist that morphs into a virtually self-contained short story. But Valentino, though shaken by his glimpses of someone who could be Oliver’s double, persists to an ending that includes the premiere of Bleak Street at Valentino’s newly opened Oracle theater and nearly 20 pages of appended lists of real-life books and movies aimed at film buffs who can’t get enough.
An irresistible popcorn chaser despite its slender mystery.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-25835-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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