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
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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