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THE POE SHADOW

A few surprises aside, however, too little of substance happens, and Pearl’s virtually bloodless characters never engage our...

The still-unexplained death of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) is the subject of the Cambridge, Mass., author’s follow-up to his popular debut historical thriller, The Dante Club (2003).

Its premise is irresistible: an investigation by young Baltimore attorney Quentin Clark into the tragic fate of his recently deceased favorite author—to whom, furthermore, Quentin had written, precipitating a friendly correspondence heightened by Clark’s impassioned “commitment to represent . . . [the] interests” of the perpetually impecunious, wrathful and doubtless alcoholic genius. Refusing to believe his idol had drunk himself to death, Quentin abandons his eternally patient fiancée, judgmental law partner and his career, traveling to Paris to seek the freelance problem-solver known to be the model for Poe’s ratiocinative genius Auguste Dupin (solver of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” among other fictional enigmas). Quentin is repeatedly interrogated, sidetracked, physically assaulted and misled as he eventually encounters both a retired amateur sleuth (Auguste Duponte) uninterested in Poe’s story and “special constable for the English” Baron Claude Dupin, who’s rather too eager to prove that he is “the real Dupin.” All three men journey to Baltimore, where the game of proving how Poe died (or was murdered) is afoot—or nearly so, in a sluggish narrative that staggers under the weight of Pearl’s considerable (and just barely effectively dramatized) researches. Interesting use is made of Poe’s stories and poems, and Pearl whets our interest with tantalizing clues (the whereabouts of the woman Poe was to have taken as his second wife; the man’s last name he uttered on his deathbed; the reason he remained in Baltimore rather than completing a planned journey from Virginia to New York).

A few surprises aside, however, too little of substance happens, and Pearl’s virtually bloodless characters never engage our interest. A disappointing successor to Pearl’s terrific first novel.

Pub Date: May 30, 2006

ISBN: 1-4000-6103-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.

In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.

Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

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