A disturbing mystery whose complex heroine’s internal struggles only enhance the storyline.
A Helsinki detective fights personal demons as she attempts to crack a string of murders.
Jessica Niemi still hasn’t recovered from the loss of her boss and mentor in The Witch Hunter (2020), and she’s still keeping big secrets from her fellow homicide squad members. The only survivor of a family car crash, Jessica inherited a large fortune, but she doesn't want her colleagues to know that she lives in her family's mansion, or that her dead mother often appears to her there—so she meets with them in a tiny apartment in an adjoining building. A talented detective, Jessica has a tenuous relationship with all her teammates except for Yusuf, her partner. Though her ambitious new boss dislikes her, she assigns her the case of Lisa Yamamoto and Jason Nervander, missing influencers who have huge social media followings. Lisa vanished after attending a party for a pop star. Her apartment is filled with her artwork, manga-style drawings of young girls dressed in school uniforms. Her roommate, Essi, claims to have no clue where she might be. So when a dead body dressed as a schoolgirl is found in the water with no obvious cause of death, Jessica has to wonder if there’s a connection. Every bit of technical wizardry and evidence from interviews suggest a link to a prostitution ring rife with sadomasochism. But Jessica refuses to give up even though her life’s in danger and she fears that her mental problems could force her to resign.
A disturbing mystery whose complex heroine’s internal struggles only enhance the storyline.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593199-69-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
Not by any means Klavan’s best, but in some inscrutable ways Klavan’s most.
Klavan, who’s evidently determined to make each adventure of assassin turned English teacher Cameron Winter more feverish than the last, turns up the heat again in this triple-decker tale.
As he sits in the office of therapist Margaret Whitaker, Winter is willing to talk endlessly about anything but Gwendolyn Lord, the previous therapist who was in love with him. He recalls his mission to track down Jerry Collins, a fellow agent of the shadowy Division who vanished while he was on his way to eliminate Istanbul child trafficker Kemal Balkin; his childhood love for Charlotte Shaefer, whose distinctive perfume he’s just smelled outside his apartment; and his reading of the joltingly fascist novel Treachery in the Night, whose heroine seems an awful lot like Charlotte. To Margaret’s complaints that he’s meandering, he replies: “In my mind, it’s all one story.” And that’s not even counting the unwelcome news that his academic colleague Roger Sexton plans to abandon his wife and young son and settle down with his student Barbara Finley, who turns out to have set her own sights more broadly. The stakes rise further when Winter follows a clue halfway across the country in hope of finding Ivy Swansag, the reclusive author of Treachery in the Night, and stumbles onto a trail even more violent than the one that led to Jerry Collins. Everyone involved in every one of the stories he spins for Margaret seems willing to blackmail, betray, or kill everyone else. Instead of hoping for a happy ending, readers will find themselves praying that this will all somehow come together.
Not by any means Klavan’s best, but in some inscrutable ways Klavan’s most.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781613165539
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
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