So many crimes and misdemeanors that you’ll need a score card. Nice local color, though.
Now that she’s quit her job as a homicide detective on Long Island, Maggie D’arcy assumes her long summer vacation in West Cork will be free of past entanglements. As if.
Maggie’s 17-year-old daughter, Lilly, instantly spots a spectral figure in the window of the cottage they’re renting on the grounds of Rosscliffe House with Maggie’s sweetie, history professor Conor Kearney. The logical candidate is Dorothea Reynolds, a governess to the children of the Crawford family, who vanished from Rosscliffe Manor in 1973. Maggie and Conor’s landlady, Lissa Crawford, a painter who grew up in the manor but sold the big house, is unhappy because she thought Dublin banker Lorcan Murphy and local builder Sam Nevin would refurbish the place, not turn it into a hotel. The customary squabbles between haves and have-lesses are upstaged at least briefly by the discovery on Crescent Beach of the late Lukas Adamik, a Pole who worked for Nevin before he too went missing. The news of his death, which everyone hopes will provide closure for his girlfriend, Zuzanna Brol, instead serves as a prelude to her own drowning. Did she fall, or was she pushed? Though DS Ann Tobin of the Garda Síochána is mourning the fatal overdose of her son, she seems perfectly competent. Even so, Maggie can’t resist taking time out from fretting about Conor’s ex and Lilly’s romance with Lukas’ friend Alex Sadowski to ask a few questions, and then a few more. The two women uncover a diffuse web of intrigue that implicates so many suspects it’s a relief when one of them is finally arrested.
So many crimes and misdemeanors that you’ll need a score card. Nice local color, though.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-25082-665-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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