Even though the identification of the murderous rapist is something of a letdown, you’ll ache for Frieda as she tears open...
Psychotherapist Frieda Klein’s fourth case is a lot more personal than she’d like, in all the worst ways.
Though they were never friends back at Braxton High School, Madeleine Capel knows all about Frieda’s celebrity (Waiting for Wednesday, 2014, etc.), and she wants her to have a chat with her 15-year-old, Becky, find out why she’s suddenly so withdrawn, and straighten her out. Becky’s not eager to talk to Frieda, but during a second session, she reveals that she’s been raped by an unidentifiable man who told her, “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. No one will believe you.” The revelation is just as shattering to Frieda as it is to Becky, for 23 years ago, when she was about Becky’s age, Frieda was raped herself by a man who parted from her with the very same words before a desultory investigation by the Braxton police led to the arrest of a man who died years ago in prison. What to do? Frieda begins by telling the friends she thinks most need to know—her builder buddy, Josef; her old analyst, Reuben; her lover in America, Sandy—about her own long-buried secret. Reuben is astonished and pained that she never said anything about this painful episode before, and Sandy’s reaction is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Determined that the man who raped both Becky and herself be brought to justice, Frieda urges Becky to go to the police. Becky reluctantly agrees, but before she can act on her newfound resolve, her mother finds her hanging from her bedroom ceiling. Stung by Maddie’s furious accusations about her part in the death of her daughter, Frieda returns to Braxton to reopen her own case—and runs smack into a tsunami of new suspicions and rejections among the people she once thought were her friends.
Even though the identification of the murderous rapist is something of a letdown, you’ll ache for Frieda as she tears open old wounds and cheer when she finally shows signs of healing from her lacerations.Pub Date: March 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312721-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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