The outline for a much better novel is here: glamorous victim, well-connected defendant, bulldog prosecutor, resourceful...
The San Diego power shortage must be affecting Paul Madriani: his latest high-profile legal suspenser is his weakest yet.
Who stopped African-American ex-model Kalista Jordan, a Stanford Ph.D. in molecular electronics, from assuming her natural place as empress of the universe, or at least head of Prof. David Crone’s Genetic Research Project by strangling and dismembering her? Veteran prosecutor Evan Tannery is convinced Kalista’s killer was Dr. Crone, rattled by the sexual harassment suit she’d filed against him and jealous of the meteoric ascent that marked her as his inevitable usurper. The prosecution has a device very much like the unusual weapon, complete with nylon bundling cords, in Crone’s possession, along with evidence of mounting hostility between the decedent and the accused; the defense attorneys, Paul (The Attorney, 2000, etc.) and his partner Harry Hinds, have a client who won’t even tell them what his lab was working on because it was so secret, and whose biggest concern throughout the booklength trial is whether the university will take him back. It gets worse, of course, when Kalista’s mother turns up at the last minute to offer evidence of a powerful motive for murder that goes far beyond sexual harassment, and the word goes out that William Epperson, the nanorobotics expert who’s been working with Crone and geneticist Aaron Tash at the lab, is prepared to back her up. But in the latest of many anticlimaxes—experts whose testimony doesn’t matter, forensic debates that go nowhere, charges of politically explosive scientific research that never get off the ground—the case against Crone suddenly collapses, though Martini has been provident enough to save Paul his customary final surprise.
The outline for a much better novel is here: glamorous victim, well-connected defendant, bulldog prosecutor, resourceful defender, weighty issues. What a shame that everything that would make it memorable has been left blank, right down to the jury.Pub Date: June 25, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14672-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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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