A beautifully written, at times lyrical, study of a disintegrating community. Roy, author of the Edgar Award-winning mystery...
What if what you think you know, you don’t really know?
In the late 1950s, Detroit’s Alder Avenue neighborhood is on edge. The heat is oppressive. Factories are closing. Blacks are moving in. The police, who neglect the murder of a black prostitute whose head was bashed in with something like a hammer, take up the case of Elizabeth Symanski, a mentally challenged young woman of 22—her mother dead, her father sliding into dementia—who left pregnant Grace Richardson’s house, was watched by Julia Wagner as she walked down the street, opened the gate to her own home and then somehow wandered off. The local women bake casseroles and set them out on impeccably ironed linen cloths for the men who leave their factory jobs to search the grid. But not everyone believes Elizabeth is just lost. Wary eyes are cast at the black residents, wondering if they’re out to avenge one of their own. Battered wife Malina Herze thinks her husband, a factory supervisor who comes home every night with the stench of his mistress on him, may have his eye on the twins visiting Julia Wagner. Julia, whose husband hasn’t touched her since their colic-plagued daughter died last year, wonders if he murdered the infant to stop the incessant crying—and if he did, what else he might do. Her best friend, Grace, about to deliver her first child, refuses to admit that she was attacked by a band of blacks because she thinks her husband couldn’t deal with it, and she believes that they’re probably responsible for Elizabeth’s disappearance. The women’s anguish leads to an assassination by car, a suicide and an unexpected revelation of what actually happened to Elizabeth.
A beautifully written, at times lyrical, study of a disintegrating community. Roy, author of the Edgar Award-winning mystery Bent Road (2011), tackles similar themes here with equally successful results.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95396-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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