Readers who know Scotland will glow with recognition; those who don’t will want to pack their bags and maybe a gun.
Endlessly resourceful editor Edwards reprints 17 tales by authors who were Scottish, or part Scottish, or set at least some parts of some of their stories in Scotland.
Eleven of the stories were first published before 1940, and none after 1974. Despite, or because of, the collection’s tendency toward the golden age, the quality is consistently high. The keynote in nearly every case is ruthless economy. Edwards has dug deep into the archives to unearth brief, mostly forgotten stories by Josephine Tey, H.H. Bashford, Margot Bennett, Cyril Hare, and, yes, Arthur Conan Doyle (a characteristic Sherlock-ian mind-reading). J. Storer Clouston’s private detective solves a series of burglaries during a hurried visit to Kinbuckie. John Ferguson’s sleuth steps back from a shipboard sweepstakes concerning which suitor Sally Silver will accept to locate her missing necklace. J.J. Connington’s Sir Clinton Driffield subjects a suspicious will to rewardingly close examination. Bill Knox’s perpetrator kidnaps the man who pulled the wool over his eyes in order to frame him for a crime spree; Michael Innes brings Sir John Appleby together with four other fishermen, one of whom is after more than fish; Jennie Melville spins a wicked tale of a discarded mistress’s revenge on the ambitious lover looking to discard her after his wife’s murder. But none of these tops the three best-known items here: Baroness Orczy’s “The Edinburgh Mystery,” a classic of armchair detection by the acknowledged pioneer of the form; G.K. Chesterton’s “The Honour of Israel Gow,” an atmospheric Father Brown tale notable for its remarkably inventive puzzle and clues; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s imperishable “Markheim,” an extended dialogue between a murderer and the devil who offers to help him escape.
Readers who know Scotland will glow with recognition; those who don’t will want to pack their bags and maybe a gun.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781728267692
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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