A charmingly complex hero (Gentlemen Formerly Dressed, 2018, etc.) whose adventures continue to highlight many worldly...
A murder in the past comes back to haunt a socially prominent Australian family.
Rowland Sinclair, an artist with leftist friends and a free-wheeling lifestyle, is the bane of his conservative brother Wilfred’s existence in the 1930s. During extensive renovations to the garden at Wilfred’s country estate, a lake is drained, revealing the gun that killed their father 13 years before. Even as the police, encouraged by an anonymous tip, suspect Rowly, Lucy Bennett, encouraged by Wilfred’s wife, decides that she’s in love with him. He's not interested, so he alienates her father by showing off his nude paintings, mostly of his housemate, Edna Higgins, an independent woman he loves but has little hope of persuading to marry him. Lucy soon finds another Sinclair to love: Rowly’s cousin Arthur, a stuffy solicitor who, cut out of his father’s will, depends on Wilfred’s good graces for his cushy lifestyle. Although he was only 15 when his father died, Rowly hated his father, who often had him badly beaten by his farm manager, Charles Hayden. His housemates all thought his father died of natural causes; the family shipped Rowly off to England right after the funeral; and he never talked about his unhappy youth. Now Wilfred asks Rowly to return to the family home to discuss problems old and new. If it weren’t for the return of Hayden, who insists that Wilfred had a row with his father because he threatened to cut him out of his will, the police might have given up. When Hayden is found beaten to death, Rowly is arrested, and Wilfred pulls every string to get him released until his case is heard. Rowly and his friends must find the real killer in order to rescue the family from scandal and himself from a prison sentence.
A charmingly complex hero (Gentlemen Formerly Dressed, 2018, etc.) whose adventures continue to highlight many worldly problems between the great wars.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0697-9
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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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