Although this current installment is not up to the level of His Majesty’s Hope (2013), it generates excitement as it...
A spy must cast off the black dog of depression in order to return to active duty.
A Brit by birth, Maggie Hope was raised in the U.S. by her aunt; when she returned to Britain, she learned that the parents she thought were killed in a car accident are alive; her father’s a codebreaker for Great Britain, her mother’s a Nazi spy. This information changes her life and commits her to the war effort. A perilous trip to Berlin to deliver a set of radio crystals has left her physically wounded and mentally exhausted. Her mother is in the Tower of London waiting to be shot, and both Maggie and her father refuse to visit her. Two wartime romances have gone sour, so now Maggie is training recruits for MI5 at a remote Scottish house, too depressed to do anything else, when another instructor convinces her to go to Edinburgh to see her old friend Sarah dance in a ballet. The ballet ends in disaster when the leading lady collapses and dies. Sarah and another cast member are detained by the police until both become dangerously ill with the same symptoms as the dead ballerina. Maggie, who has seen similar symptoms in a sheep, is released from her depression by her quest to save her friend. While she's sleuthing in Scotland, the U.S. intelligence services, who have cracked the Japanese code, are blithely ignoring the danger signals of an imminent attack, and Churchill, certain that the U.S. will respond to any attack with a declaration of war, is pondering the moral implications of ignoring the coming crisis.
Although this current installment is not up to the level of His Majesty’s Hope (2013), it generates excitement as it explores the moral issues involved in winning the just war.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53674-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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