The mix of well-established characters from previous series entries combined with a focus on the pomp and circumstance of...
A fox hunting–focused community’s search for a missing energy company head leads to a surprising discovery and further mystery.
Shifting this series (Crazy Like a Fox, 2017, etc.) from mysteries with a fox-hunting background to celebrations of fox hunting that include a mystery, Brown begins her latest with a Cast of Characters that includes almost 30 humans; American foxhounds; horses; foxes: red; foxes: gray; birds; and pets; with an additional five pages of Some Useful Terms of fox hunting lingo. This litmus test will help readers decide in advance whether they’ll love or loathe the story, which shows members of the Jefferson Hunt unraveling the mystery of a guest who’s disappeared from their Christmas Day outing. Jane Arnold, the 70-something Master of Foxhounds for the Blue Ridge group, is surprised when her friend Ronnie, the club treasurer, mentions that he’s bringing Gregory Luckham on their latest hunt. Luckham has been a controversial figure as the head of Soliden, an energy firm building a pipeline that will be environmentally iffy and will also affect local property values—two big no-nos with most of the hunt crowd. The horse Luckham’s been riding shows up solo when it’s time to load up, but with snow-blind conditions, there’s no way to look for the rider. When the others regroup to search for him, they can’t believe what they find: no sign of Luckham but the murdered body of someone else. What follows is a mix of fox hunting and looking for Luckham, though the possibility that he’s alive becomes less likely with each passing hunt. The characters are developed through hunt members’ commentary on newer member Tootsie’s potential romance and through the bickering between animals less interested in mystery than their own cunning and sass. The biggest mystery may be the climax, which skims over the wrongdoer’s denial of a second crime in a wasted opportunity for a twist.
The mix of well-established characters from previous series entries combined with a focus on the pomp and circumstance of fox hunting may not win many new readers; this is aimed at those in the fox-hunting and adjacent horse-fancying worlds who can appreciate Brown’s eye for accurate details throughout.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-17837-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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