No matter. Readers who love books will love reading about books, the people who love them, the people who kill for them, and...
Indefatigable mystery bookseller/editor Penzler (The Big Book of Jack the Ripper, 2016, etc.) has assembled—wait for it—a collection of 15 stories linking murders to books, originally commissioned between 2011 and 2013 as feuilletons distributed by the Mysterious Bookshop.
Despite the name-brand roster of contributors, this is a very mixed bag, like so many of the bags readers and characters alike bring home from used bookstores. Jeffery Deaver’s tale of government agents bent on assassinating a villainous Mexican bibliophile is ingenious without being memorable. Bookcases crush booksellers to no great effect in Nelson DeMille’s (twisty and lightweight) and William Link’s (a guilty noir pleasure). C.J. Box, Peter Blauner, and Thomas H. Cook all root their tales in the history of World War II: Blauner’s duel between the dying Sigmund Freud and a would-be Third Reich blackmailer has the intensity of a good tennis match; Cook’s counterfactual anecdote makes much of a surprise that won’t surprise most readers; Box’s Western contribution to wartime intrigue defies classification or belief, even if it’s all true. Ken Bruen is tiresomely tough (lots of one-word paragraphs), Andrew Taylor tiresomely literary. Reed Farrel Coleman and Loren D. Estleman recycle familiar formulas with professional briskness; Max Allan Collins’ completion of a Mickey Spillane story inflates the formula without varying it. Laura Lippman, Anne Perry, and David Bell provide promising premises that peter out gracefully and often touchingly. Even the prize here, John Connolly’s Edgar-winning tale of a book lover who stumbles onto the strangest library in the world, is more notable for its lovely proposition than its execution.
No matter. Readers who love books will love reading about books, the people who love them, the people who kill for them, and the people who kill with them—often the very same people.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-458-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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