Like her other recent, long mysteries (Death of an Expert Witness, The Skull Beneath the Skin), James' new 480-page novel is absorbing reading, chockablock with arresting characters, edgily compelling conversation, and grainy atmospherics. Also like those books, however, it isn't a first-rate-mystery—and its final chapters, suddenly reaching for ambitious psychological melodrama (reminiscent of Ruth Rendell), show James' talent straining against the genre limitations. Sir Paul Berowne, a former Crown minister who has recently had some sort of religious awakening, is found bloodily dead in the vestry of a humble London church; nearby is the body of a similarly slain tramp. Scotland Yard's first impression? That an unhinged Berowne killed the tramp, then committed suicide. But poet-sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, leading a special squad, is not convinced. And his full-scale investigation focuses primarily on the layered secrets of the grand Berowne household: the dead man's imperious, aged mother; his frivolous, pregnant, unfaithful (second) wife; his estranged, leftist daughter; family retainers, both bitter and doting. Virtually everyone has a motive. . .and an alibi. Meanwhile, too, James offers sympathetic portraits of non-suspects—like the timid spinster and the local waif who found the bodies; or smart young policewoman Kate Miskin, who's determined to leave her down-scale background (including an aging grandmother) behind. Paradoxically, however, neither of the two central figures here—Dalgliesh himself and murder-victim Sir Paul—emerges with comparable sharpness. And there's a sense of anticlimax when the unmasked killer (unsurprising, unconvincing) takes cop Kate as a hostage—in a harrowing yet contrived and lopsided finale. Unlike Dorothy L. Sayers at her best, then, James hasn't quite managed to combine novelistic richness with disturbing, satisfying mystery. (Rendell, less ambitiously, channels her equally complex talents into many small, neat books in different genres.) But, resonating with themes, from family responsibility to class warfare to the perils of ambition, this leisurely, somber investigation is moodily compelling most of the way through—and only disappointing in its fitful, hollow resolutions.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1986
ISBN: 1400096472
Page Count: 585
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986
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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