The blazingly original Phillips (The Walkway, 2002, etc.) writes with deadpan humor and incisive irony. The story is shaggy,...
Frontier Guignol in post–Civil War Kansas and California of the 1870s and ’80s.
Unflappable Bill Ogden objects more to the quality of his wife Ninna’s extramarital affairs than to their quantity. After all, he and Ninna, for all practical purposes, live apart, she outside of Cottonwood on their farm with surly son Clyde and he in town above his saloon. Bill’s stated reason is that he’s taking care of business, which includes not only the saloon but also a nascent career as a photographer; in reality, he dallies as often as his wife, and his droll first-person narrative combines amorality with a genuine, if laid-back, joie de vivre. He gleefully shoots holes through the bowler of Ninna’s foppish latest, a pots-and-pans salesman named A.J. Harticourt, who later turns up mysteriously dead. Indeed, Cottonwood is a real Wild West town, but not in the way one might expect. Its colorful population includes a remarkably high number of hedonists and sociopaths, and there are a similarly large number of disappearances and random corpses. Foremost among the former is Katie Bender, who lives with her German-born mother and advertises herself as a mystic and miracle healer. At length, Bill learns that Katie and mom are serial killers with an impressive number of victims. When flashy industrialist Marc Leval comes from Chicago with beautiful wife Maggie and a plan to turn Cottonwood into a railroad boomtown, Bill quickly becomes Marc’s partner and Maggie’s lover. Marc’s proposal proves unpopular, however, as townspeople threaten violence and more. After an unexpected shooting leads to a makeshift posse and Bill’s drift away from corrupt Cottonwood, he heads for San Francisco, where his photographic business thrives for more than a decade. On his return to Kansas, he finds Cottonwood gripped by a dramatic murder trial.
The blazingly original Phillips (The Walkway, 2002, etc.) writes with deadpan humor and incisive irony. The story is shaggy, but its unique slant on the Old West is a major achievement.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46100-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
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