Ah, the human mind. Masters keeps its noodles at a rolling boil.
First U.S. publication of a thriller by a Brit known for her medical mysteries.
Clinical Psychiatrist Claire Roget spends her first day at Greatbach Secure Psychiatrist Unit smelling the blood of Heidi Faro through the wall paint of her new office. Heidi, whom Claire replaces, had her throat cut in this very room, by the mild-mannered but brain-damaged Stefan Gulio. Yes, he was found holding a bloody knife, but Gulio swears he didn’t do it—and also didn’t hang Heidi’s body on the door hook. Claire, a specialist in personality disorders, hopes for a tiny red flag to warn her against such horror happening to her, and the story sweeps you along as she begins evaluating patients for release to the outside world. Greatbach is not a prison, but some of its patients—sly sociopaths or well-spoken psychopaths—should have gone straight to prison. Jerome Barclay, a psycho thief who beats his mother and girlfriend, gives her grueling grief, as do Nancy Gold, the baby-drowner who thinks she still has her dead baby, and paranoid pot-smoker Kap Oseo, a Rastafarian pursued by demons. You can’t medicate personality disorders, and with Barclay, a lifelong sadist, Heidi Faro had had a dance of death. Under a supervisory order, Barclay lives outside the hospital. Heidi’s notes reveal that he would enjoy cutting the throat of beautiful nurse Kristyna Gale. Should Claire warn Nurse Gale? Even so, after an interview with Barclay’s frightened mother (he may have killed his father and brother), Claire lets him off of supervision: Greatbach can do no more for him. She tells fellow doctor and clinical psychologist Rolf Fairweather about Barclay’s threat. Does Barclay put the acid on Claire’s car? Kristyna disappears, her body turning up in a burned car. And when the killer is finally unmasked, will he make . . . a plea for insanity? You bet.
Ah, the human mind. Masters keeps its noodles at a rolling boil.Pub Date: July 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7490-8337-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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