Fans will love the endlessly knotty complications; those unable to commit their full attention to the problem at hand may...
The smothering of a supremely unlikable woman provokes a conspiracy, a false confession, a hysterical outburst and round upon round of sifting through the evidence by DC Simon Waterhouse and his wife, DS Charlie Zailer (Kind of Cruel, 2013, etc.).
Francine Breary was no prize even before the stroke that left her unable to move or speak. She’d taken accountant Tim Breary away from Gaby Struthers, the brilliant, wealthy tech developer he loved, and persuaded him to marry her, then proceeded to make his life miserable. So it’s no wonder Tim has confessed to her murder, adding parenthetically that he doesn’t know why he did it. Every detail of his confession is backed up by the other residents of The Dower House—former caregiver Kerry Jose; her husband, Daniel; Francine’s caregiver, Lauren Cookson; and Lauren’s brutal husband, Jason. But Gaby, stranded overnight in Düsseldorf with an obnoxious stranger who turns out to be Lauren, hears her unwanted companion insist that Tim is being sent to his death for a murder he didn't commit—then sees her escape into the night before Gaby can question her further. Lauren's outburst throws new light on the man Charlie, watching from the sidelines, has dubbed the Don’t Know Why Killer but raises a host of uncomfortable new questions which are meat and drink to Hannah (The Orphan Choir, 2014, etc.). Before the curtain finally comes down, Simon will have heard unwelcome revelations from his boss’ daughter, questioned Gaby about who assaulted her moments after she walked out on her live-in lover, and contemplated a second body cooling in the morgue. Hannah bores down deep into her tiny cast’s secret lives, then still deeper, pausing along the way to cite or reprint a dozen poems, some of them clues, some not.
Fans will love the endlessly knotty complications; those unable to commit their full attention to the problem at hand may well quit in exhaustion before the denouement.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-670-78586-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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