The murder plays second fiddle to the exponentially more fascinating hunt for historical data that will reveal all the...
A small Maryland town struggling for survival becomes a magnet for murder.
When unemployed Kate Hamilton was asked by a former high school friend to come up with ideas to help save their hometown of Asheboro from extinction (Murder at the Mansion, 2018), she never thought she’d end up staying. The town’s magnificent Barton mansion needs little work to become a tourist attraction, and a storm recently revealed that downtown Asheboro has lovely Victorian buildings hidden under modern excrescences. So Kate hopes to reinvent the town as a living history area, like a pint-sized Colonial Williamsburg. Since Asheboro’s broke, Kate devises a plan to get all the merchants on board and come up with the money for restoration. She calls in archivist Carroll Peterson to root through the treasure trove of papers found in the Barton mansion in hope of finding things that could help her both historically and financially. Kate’s boyfriend, Johns Hopkins professor Josh Wainwright, who serves as the mansion’s caretaker while working on a project in his field of 19th-century industrialization, is more than willing to help. So is her landlord, attorney Ryan Walker, her old high school squeeze. Having received permission to use the town library, which is currently closed, to organize the paperwork once it’s moved from the mansion, she and Carroll stop in to check out the space only to find a dead body partially buried under a fallen bookcase and piles of books. Because she’s no more persuaded than the police that the death was an accident, Kate adds sleuthing to her list of things to do. She continues to talk to everyone she can find who has knowledge of Asheboro’s past, when Barton’s shovel factory was the biggest employer in the area. The key to both her plans and the murder are to be found among the secrets in the abandoned factory.
The murder plays second fiddle to the exponentially more fascinating hunt for historical data that will reveal all the answers.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-13588-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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