Fans of bookish European fiction will enjoy this, the too abundant Dan Brown–ian motions notwithstanding.
Who was that Cowled Man? Austrian novelist Pötzsch serves up an ambitious though familiar tale of Mad King Ludwig.
Clues tucked away in old books, secret societies (cowled, naturally, the better to hide) seeking to keep the secrets in those musty pages safe from prying eyes, history hinging on the occult—it’s well-worked territory. That said, Pötzsch (The Beggar King, 2013) will endear himself to independent booksellers everywhere by making the hero of the piece one of their kind (“[h]ours of dealing with damaged books had hit him harder than he liked to admit”), if one unusually full of lethal surprises (“[t]he king would never have believed the bookseller capable of killing one of the strongest knights in cold blood”). At his side stands Sara Lengfeld, ace art detective—“Art detective? More like a female Philip Marlowe,” thinks Steven, antiquarian bookseller, appreciatively. How a secret diary has come into Steven’s hands is one of many implausibilities in a story that begs and begs again the suspension of disbelief, but no matter: Anyone who’s visited Bavaria and toured the great Neuschwanstein Castle will have wondered why Ludwig II, the brilliant and eccentric ruler of that formerly independent state, wound up deposed and dead under very strange circumstances, and Pötzsch offers an intriguing, entertaining answer. Moreover, his novel includes a virtual book-within-book tour of Ludwig’s two palaces, along with that castle, in which clues unfold at a brisk pace. The writing is occasionally clunky (“His headache the next morning told Steven that the Montepulciano had been a bit stronger than he was used to”; “[t]he ramshackle horse-drawn cab tossed Steven roughly back and forth”), but the tale moves along well enough, and it resolves nicely.
Fans of bookish European fiction will enjoy this, the too abundant Dan Brown–ian motions notwithstanding.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-74010-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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