As in the superb Make Death Love Me (1979), Britain's queen of dark irony is again doing nice tricks with parallel, interlocking plots—but here, though Rendell is never less than swiftly readable, the fabrication doesn't quite soar: the characters are an unlikable crew; the balance between the two halves of the story is lopsided; and, most crucially, the reliance on contrivance or coincidence (which almost marred Make Death Love Me) pretty near shatters the narrative spell. Thirtyish, rather priggish (perhaps latently homosexual) accountant Martin Urban has secretly won a small fortune in the football pools, thanks to his old acquaintance, journalist Tim. But instead of sharing the loot with Tim, Martin decides to play benefactor to five needy souls caught in London's dreadful housing shortage. This doesn't turn out to be so easy, however. Moreover, Martin gets distracted by the arrival in his life of beautiful, semi-mysterious Francesca—a married woman (with a child) whom he is soon intently trying to woo away from her (never-seen) husband. But what Martin doesn't know is that sneaky faker Francesca is really Tim's girlfriend; they're out for nasty revenge, out to get some of the money that Martin declined to share with Tim. And just about the time that Martin starts to suspect something fishy with Francesca, he happens to select mad old Mrs. Finn (his mother's former charwoman) as one of his five lucky charity cases. So what happens when Martin starts offering money to Mrs. F.'s son—a childlike psychotic who's recently begun a career as a mystical-minded hit man? That's right: total misunderstanding—which, combined with a coincidence or two, ends up with crazy, creepy Finn zeroing in on naughty Francesca. . . A neat set of premises, a fine sense of place, a witty fugue on the themes of greed and real estate—modestly entertaining if read as a not-quite-for-real black comedy. But Rendell (whose uncharacteristic sloppiness here includes such gaucheries as "paranoidly") has made only a half-successful chiller out of her inspired plot notions this time around, a wily tale with middling credibility and minimal emotional grab.
Pub Date: July 25, 1980
ISBN: 0375704973
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1980
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
