The book ends on a cliffhanger worthy of Harry Potter, and Rowling’s readers will eagerly await the next installment.
J.K. Rowling continues her investigation of the dark side—this time giving us three gruesomely twisted suspects—in her latest pseudonymous mystery.
Robin Ellacott first showed up at hard-living private eye Cormoran Strike’s office as a temp, but by the end of their second big case (The Silkworm, 2014), she’d become indispensable as a fellow investigator. As this third book opens, she’s arriving at work off Charing Cross Road and accepts a package from a deliveryman, thinking it’s a shipment of favors for her upcoming wedding to Matthew, the jealous fiance who disapproves of her job. When she opens it, though, she’s horrified to find a woman’s leg. Someone seems to be using Robin to get to her boss, who's missing a leg himself, having lost it in an explosion in Afghanistan. Strike can think of four men, right off the top of his head, who would be capable of such a horrific thing: the stepfather he thinks killed his mother with a heroin overdose; a famous mobster; and two sick bastards he tangled with when he was an Army investigator. The police immediately go after the mobster, who, on second thought, Strike finds an unlikely culprit—so he and Robin set to work tracking down the other three. Rowling is, as always, an unflinching chronicler of evil, interspersing chapters told from the perspective of the carefully unnamed perpetrator—a serial killer with a penchant for keeping “souvenirs” from his victims’ bodies and an unhealthy obsession with Strike—as he follows Robin around London, waiting for her to get distracted just long enough for him to kill her, too. Robin and Strike’s relationship continues to be the best part of the series, though perhaps it’s too easy to dislike Matthew; readers will be cheering when Robin breaks off their engagement, but of course it won’t be that easy to get rid of him. The story has its longueurs, and if Galbraith weren’t actually Rowling, an editor might have told him to trim a bit, especially once Strike and Robin close in on their three suspects and start conducting repetitive stakeouts (and especially since the two who aren’t Strike’s former stepfather are hard to keep straight).
The book ends on a cliffhanger worthy of Harry Potter, and Rowling’s readers will eagerly await the next installment.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-34993-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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