Very smart, with a tight plot and richer-than-average characterizations.
A coroner in small-town England struggles against the police, elements of the government and her own demons to find out what happened to two suspected radicals.
Jenny Cooper, the fraught protagonist of Hall’s debut (The Coroner, 2008, U.K. only), is once again trying to solve a case that powerful, interested parties would just as soon keep unsolved. This time, though, she’s quit drinking, and the only pills she takes are the ones her psychiatrist prescribes to keep her anxiety at bay. Mrs. Jamal, a distraught mother almost unhinged by grief, turns to Jenny as a last resort, desperate to learn what happened to her son Nazim and his friend Rafi, who disappeared seven years ago. The authorities seem sure the young men went abroad to join extremists in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but she’s sure they didn’t, despite their involvement with a radical Islamic group. Jenny’s decision to convene an inquest is met with a marked lack of cooperation by the police and MI5, who for unknown reasons would rather the whole thing go away. But whenever she is tempted to let things slide, she’s urged on by Alec MacAvoy, a disgraced and amoral but charming and charismatic former lawyer in pursuit of his own shrouded agenda. Jenny’s burgeoning feelings for Alec threaten to upset the delicate emotional balance she’s created as she struggles to get over a divorce, get along with her teenage son and get to the bottom of the ever-darkening mystery surrounding Nazim and Rafi’s disappearance. Stubborn but fragile, dedicated to her work but always unsure as to whether she has the mettle to seek out the truth when everyone around her seems dead set on keeping it hidden, Jenny is a complex, compelling heroine. Hall does a stellar job of eliciting our empathy for her struggles with her job, her emotions, her addictions and her anxieties.
Very smart, with a tight plot and richer-than-average characterizations.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5698-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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