This sequel to The Cracked Spine (2016) is rich in Scottish dialect and eccentric characters, including a well-meaning...
A murder at a Scottish castle reveals a murky past.
Kansas transplant Delaney Nichols and her protective landlord drive to Castle Doune outside Edinburgh to do a favor for her boss, Edwin MacAlister. Purveyor of rare books and manuscripts, Edwin owns The Cracked Spine bookstore in Edinburgh, and he’s asked Delaney to pick up a vintage comic book from a William Wallace re-enactor. They find the re-enactor in full costume and as dead as Wallace, with the comic book half-hidden on the castle roof. The dead man, Billy Armstrong, was the son of Gordon Armstrong, an old friend of Edwin’s, though the two men fell out 50 years ago and Gordon supposedly died in a recent fire. Almost immediately, Gordon shows up at the bookstore, very much alive and smelling of fish from the market where he works under an assumed name, accusing Edwin of having something to do with his son's death. Assisted by her boyfriend, Tom, Delaney returns to the castle to try to find a paper—a handwritten account of why Gordon has been in hiding—that was supposedly inside the book. Instead they turn up a dirk—a foot-long Scottish knife—and a business card printed with the name “Grizel Sheehy, Bagpipes,” that has Billy’s last name written on the back. Delaney’s fondness for Edwin leads her to lie to the police, nose her way into other people’s business, and walk into danger as she attempts to find out not only who killed Billy, but what really happened 50 years ago to come between Gordon, Edwin, and other members of a secret society. Is the real message to Edwin the dirk that Delaney found? How many times will the name William figure into past and present mysteries? Did Grizel kill Billy with her bagpipes? And will all the literary voices—quotations from fictional characters—help Delaney find the answers she seeks or get her killed?
This sequel to The Cracked Spine (2016) is rich in Scottish dialect and eccentric characters, including a well-meaning heroine who brings on most of her own troubles.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-05749-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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