A well-crafted mystery and look at small-town Kansas life.
The joys of simple pleasures, the complexity of family life, and the investigation into a local man’s murder weave through this midcentury mystery.
The characters are different and the era is earlier by two decades, but, aside from murder, what connects the first book in Litton’s Kansas Murder Trilogy, King Harvest (2022), and this one is sense of place—rural Kansas (“the smell of rich earth, of worms and roots and growing plants rising in the sunbaked air”). Recent widower Willis Thurman, aided by his peculiar 14-year-old son, Riley, farms that land. Like a lot of boys, Riley crushes on 15-year-old Bonny Marshal. When Bonny’s father, Jack, learns his daughter is pregnant with Willis’ child, he is enraged. So he is naturally the prime suspect when Deputy Guy Craig finds Willis dead in his barn with a head wound and Jack rushing from the scene. After a day on the run, police locate Jack on the ranch of Lyle Sewter—a “man measured by what he owned and what he could buy.” What Lyle couldn’t do is keep his wife away from married Jack; the two once had an affair known around town as “the scandal of ’53.” The popular coach of the Wolves, a baseball team comprised of “sons of working men and farmers,” Jack “The Lion” Marshal had his way with many willing women. Jack tells Guy he touched the murder weapon but didn’t kill Willis; he ran from the barn because he looked guilty. But Sheriff Charlie Simms doesn’t buy it. This character-driven mystery overflows with smart dialogue and rich description. Although hard times and poverty fill many pages, so do small-town pleasures, like watching for Sputnik while lying on soft grass on a summer night. The cast members’ backstories easily lace through the text, and sex, love, and the loss of both are well presented.
A well-crafted mystery and look at small-town Kansas life.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63789-781-2
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Gordian Knot Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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