Not perfect in its particulars but engrossing and tensely haunting nonetheless.
Woman doctor’s life spins out of control after receiving a poison pen letter: a third novel from pediatrician, memoirist, and storywriter Klass (Love and Modern Medicine, 2001, etc.).
Maggie is a neonatal specialist in a revered Boston hospital. Brought up by a single mother, Maggie has escaped the poverty and Christian fundamentalism of her childhood by maintaining an almost obsessive control over herself and the details of her life. Her work is intense and rewarding, and she’s up for promotion to an even more important position. She’s married to the saintly, ever-patient Dan, who works without personal ambition at a clinic for the indigent. Although disappointed that their attempts to conceive have failed, Dan and Maggie dote on each other in the way only childless couples can. Klass works a little too hard to let us know what a perfect, controlled life Maggie leads; there’s a tendency to repeat information from one chapter to the next about Maggie and Dan’s habits. One day, Maggie receives an anonymous hate letter in her immaculate office at the hospital, then her office is desecrated in a particularly nasty way. Soon, letters implying that she’s been involved in a child’s death, falsifying credentials, and abusing drugs appear on hospital walls where her patients’ parents can read them. As Maggie’s life starts to unravel, Klass does a powerful job of delineating the helplessness of someone faced with an anonymous threat. She does a weaker job with the personality of the doctor-villain whose identity she gives us early on. His motivations seem pat and his creepiness contrived, but Klass adds a clever twist when his medical instincts overtake his need for sick revenge. The hospital is predictably cowardly in the face of possible scandal, although the diligent outside investigator is the stuff mystery series are made of. The happy ending seems both tacked on and tacky.
Not perfect in its particulars but engrossing and tensely haunting nonetheless.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-10961-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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