Sensitive but unimpressive. The early paranoid previsions of all-too-contemporary fears about immigrants just aren’t enough...
November 1915 finds Butler’s durable war correspondent/secret agent Christopher Marlowe Cobb expecting some time away from cloak and dagger. Fate, the Germans, and his boss have other plans.
Despite the pleas of the Foreign Office and the manifest inability of the British and French to win the Great War on their own, Woodrow Wilson is stubbornly keeping the U.S. on the sidelines. But of course there’s nothing to prevent Kit (The Empire of Night, 2014, etc.) from sending the Chicago Post-Express inspiring tales of Americans like John Barrington Lacey, Cyrus Parsons, and Jefferson Jones, who’ve volunteered to serve as ambulance drivers. Kit’s relatively sedate plans of riding along with these drivers and getting them to pour their hearts out are upended by a bombing at the Terminus Hôtel and the promise of more. James Polk Trask, the head of the American Secret Service, thinks Kit would be the perfect candidate to infiltrate the ranks of recent German immigrants who may secretly be saboteurs. It’s hard to share his confidence, since the first person Kit suspects of heading the saboteurs is vindicated in a spectacularly abrupt way, and his second suspect disappears while Kit is supposed to be keeping an eye on him. Luckily for Kit, he’s far more successful at romancing Louise Pickering, a New England–born nurse who’s just as wary of strangers as he is and just as susceptible to high-flown sentiments. As for the rest, readers who don’t know how World War I turned out will find no spoilers and precious little espionage. Paris isn’t the only thing in the dark here.
Sensitive but unimpressive. The early paranoid previsions of all-too-contemporary fears about immigrants just aren’t enough to lift Butler’s latest above the crowd of stiff-upper-lip period tales of the War to End All Wars.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2837-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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