A modest entertainment, holding hours of fun in ferreting out anachronisms once the voices-sorting-out is through. But...
A sprawling cowl-and-dagger novel-by-committee, recounting a game of theological spy vs. spy.
Luther Blissett is a learned-allusion pseudonym for four unnamed Italian writers; the publisher tells us only that they are young, and that Q is a “cult bestseller” in Europe. The book has its pleasures, one of which makes for the same kind of fun that Harold Bloom had in distinguishing the authors of the Book of Genesis—namely, identifying the voices of those four young scribes. One of them, it seems safe to say, is quite fond of the earthier matters in life: “He farts, sniggers, swigs. ‘Fuck it!’ ” His/hers is the voice of a mysterious Anabaptist heretic who, inspired by Martin Luther and kindred spirits, travels across Germany stirring up religious dissent, railing against corrupt priests and wayward aristocrats. Against this agent of the Reformation stands the equally mysterious Q, an agent of the papacy, who adds a somewhat more refined if equally strident voice to the mix. Q has a flair for E. Howard Hunt/G. Gordon Liddy–style dirty tricks: for instance, his notion of planting a Luther-style agent provocateur, “more diabolical than the devil’s friar, someone who would eclipse his fame and give voice to the desires of the mob” in order to frighten the German ruling class into inviting the pope’s armies up north for some good old-fashioned bloodletting. Heretic and Q chase each other across Europe for several hundred pages and a quarter of a century, developing a grudging respect for each other along the way. Set Les Miserables in Reformation Europe, with Javert reporting to an evil cardinal instead of the prefect of police, and you’ll have something of this book. Or imagine a Name of the Rose–like historical thriller coauthored by, say, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith: “Watch your arse among the Mohammedans and careful where you stick your cock!”
A modest entertainment, holding hours of fun in ferreting out anachronisms once the voices-sorting-out is through. But surely one of the best multiauthor novels of the Reformation to appear in recent times.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101063-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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