The title story makes this barely-a-collection worth a closer look—especially if you missed it the first time around.
The other stories promised by the subtitle are nothing more than a pair of six-year-old curtain-raisers for the main event, the 185-page 1981 novella “Karma.” In the first of the two opening acts, “The Court of Celestial Appeals,” Dunlap’s whimsically unnamed, ungendered Celestial Detective (The Celestial Buffet, 2001), an unwilling astral being appointed to investigate earthly crime, solves the murder of heaven’s newest arrival, huffy California senatorial candidate Judge Stone Girard. In “A Contest Fit for a Queen,” Dunlap’s regular sleuth, Berkeley cop Jill Smith (No Immunity, 1998, etc.), competes with Seth Howard, her fellow beat officer and sometime lover, to see who can tell a better story of their most memorable Valentine’s Day collars, only to find out that their two collars are smartly complementary. The novel-length title story begins with a magic trick: a Ceremony of Dissolution of Hate at a Buddhist ashram that veers out of control when the presiding guru is stabbed to death on stage in view of dozens of witnesses. Digging into Bhutanese Padmasvana’s past and the checkered lives of his followers—from his laconic assistant to his self-satisfied American impresario to a tepee-dwelling groupie to a grasping realtor whose son was the victim last year of a conveniently accidental drug overdose at the ashram—Jill soon uncovers a net of deception so tightly woven that every new round of interviews bares new secrets.
The title story makes this barely-a-collection worth a closer look—especially if you missed it the first time around.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7862-4173-X
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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