An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.
St. Denis chief of police Bruno Courreges helps his mentor solve a case that’s puzzled him for decades.
Chief Detective Jalipeau, known to his closest friends as J-J, keeps a skull on his desk in the South of France. Not as a memento mori but as a reminder that as far as he’s risen, there’s still one case—his first—that he’s been unable to solve. Then Bruno gets a brain wave. While looking at displays of Neanderthals in the local museum, he wonders: Why can’t whoever restored these primitive folk help J-J reconstruct Oscar, as he calls his bony souvenir? Bruno tracks down anthropologist Elisabeth Daynès, who recommends Virginie, a graduate student who’s ready for a new challenge. While Virginie is hard at work re-creating Oscar’s musculature, Bruno has a second idea. Why not trace Oscar’s DNA through modern data banks? He quickly gets a hit and just as quickly hits a wall. Oscar had a son, a soldier named Louis Castignac, who was recently killed in action in Mali. As Castignac’s half sister, Sabine, who happens to be a gendarme, helps Bruno try to figure out who her brother's biological father was, Bruno deals with a host of other entanglements. His cousin Alain is getting married. His basset hound, Balzac, has just sired a litter, and he wants to choose two perfect homes for the puppies he will receive as a stud fee. His journalist friends Gilles and Jacqueline have caused a stir by publishing articles about the Rosenholz dossier, a secret document containing names of French agents who worked for the Stasi. Perhaps most urgent, drought has threatened St. Denis with wildfires, and Bruno must band together with the other villagers to protect their farms and their homes.
An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65667-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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