Fans of the series (Aunt Dimity and the Widow’s Curse, 2017, etc.) will find this tale less mysterious than previous...
Plans for a quiet romantic weekend go badly wrong when Mother Nature strikes.
Lori and Bill Shepherd’s life with their three children in the charming Cotswold village of Finch is lovely but so busy that Bill thinks Lori’s a bit burned out. He suggests she join him on a visit to a client near Rye and then spend some time at The Mermaid Inn, a great historic accommodation with all mod cons and fantastic food. Lori drops Bill off at Blayne Hall and heads for Rye, where Bill will soon join her courtesy of his client’s chauffeur. The typical English rain turns into a fierce storm that forces Lori to take shelter at St. Alfege’s church in Shepney, where she makes the acquaintance of Christopher Wyndham, who, as it turns out, is a bishop and her guide and companion when the flooding forces her to remain in Shepney. Unfortunately, a whole tour bus is also stuck there, leaving only one room available for Lori in a dusty attic at The King’s Ransom. Undaunted, Lori pitches in to help. Soon she’s peeling veggies for Steve, the cook, who, despite his size and tattoos, is a marvelous chef. When Lori hears footsteps, children laughing, and creaking doors during the night, she’s comforted by the blank book in which the spectral Aunt Dimity writes sage advice in times of trouble. After hearing tales of ghosts and smugglers, Lori resolves to figure out who or what is making the mysterious noises. With the help of the bishop and various locals, she tries to determine where the inn’s name came from. Was there really a king involved? She comes up with several theories that are rather more theatrical than either the mysterious sounds or the inn’s name would seem to require. But all is revealed in the end.
Fans of the series (Aunt Dimity and the Widow’s Curse, 2017, etc.) will find this tale less mysterious than previous installments but equally heartwarming and filled with all kinds of interesting people.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52265-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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