Modest, tidy and fast-moving: a pleasing lesser entry in Walker’s dossier.
Amos Walker’s 24th case takes him from Detroit to the suburban wilds of Iroquois Heights, where the natives are just as restless.
Despite the posters with Donald Gates’ image she’s plastered all over town, his wife, Amelie, still doesn’t know who killed him. Nor does Lt. Ray Henty, who remembers Walker from his days on the Detroit force. So when the $10,000 reward an anonymous donor offers through Christ Episcopal Church flushes out every busybody in Iroquois Heights, Henty asks Walker, who’s just coming off rehab for the Vicodin he used to get over the trauma of his last case (Don’t Look for Me, 2014), to follow up with the most promising callers. Things happen right away, though not the things Henty had in mind. Christ Episcopal’s the Rev. Florence Melville, Don’s pre-Amelie girlfriend, hires Walker to find his killer. Roy Thompson, a maintenance man in Don’s office who heard traffic-light computer programmer Yuri Yako complain that Don had done no real work ever since installing the system years ago, is killed. So is Yako, whose last name is really Crowley. With three victims to worry about, Henty starts to get hot around the collar, especially after Deputy U.S. Marshal Mary Ann Thaler, of Witness Security, shows up to put her oar in. In short order, red flags go up concerning the Ukrainian mob, the federal spook on Walker’s back, and the Ritalin Don and Amelie’s 10-year-old son is taking. But Walker distinguishes the real leads from the phonies until he does indeed know who killed Don Gates—though not in time to claim that reward.
Modest, tidy and fast-moving: a pleasing lesser entry in Walker’s dossier.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3735-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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