The murders are only the tip of the iceberg in this densely plotted tale. Despite its busy program of felonies, you can’t...
A woman with a shady past continues to prove a capable amateur sleuth.
When Barbara Petrovitch’s husband, Joe, is murdered in the movie theater where he serves as a projectionist, she begs Jessie Beckett, who works with her at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, to investigate, knowing her success in the past (Renting Silence, 2016, etc.). Douglas Fairbanks agrees to give Jessie some time off, and she soon discovers that Joe, a Serb who sometimes beat Barbara, had a past that was far from an open book. Meanwhile, Helen, one of several women with whom Jessie shares a house, is watching her cousin, Kit Riley, a deaf and mute girl whose mother is off looking for a job. When her mother does not return and sends no word of her whereabouts, Jessie begins to suspect that Kit’s hiding her ability to read lips and, indeed, talk. Jessie’s beau, David Carr, has just been arrested and Jessie testifies at his murder trial. He beats that rap but is convicted on some lesser charges. Jessie and David both have checkered pasts, but she’s now honestly employed, and as far as she knows, David has been successful in selling medicinal alcohol in his drugstores. With a lifetime of background in vaudeville, Jessie, who’s been on her own since she was 12, soon figures out that Joe’s killer escaped by quickly changing his look and calmly walking out of the theater. She finds several other Serbian men who’ve been killed in the same way, shot three times in public, but hasn’t managed to learn why someone wants them dead. When Kit’s mother is found murdered in another city, what Kit has seen and heard in the past go a long way toward helping Jessie solve several crimes.
The murders are only the tip of the iceberg in this densely plotted tale. Despite its busy program of felonies, you can’t help cheering on the brave heroine and her young helper, both of whom have faced a life of adversity.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8714-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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