Knockout debut by a Southern California cloth-of-Chandler thriller writer who keeps his metaphors tingling amid smart dialogue and whose style already has the ripe, heady grip of a salted margarita. Tom Shepard, 32, is the new homicide detective in Orange County's wealthy, tennis- and boat-loving Laguna Beach, whose 100,000 population graphs a .5 annual murder rate—or one body every two years. Not much work for the hometown returnee—until the Fire Killer appears, a murderer who announces his coming with gift Bibles to his victims, each book's title page red-lettered with an aphorism such as LIARS BURN AND LITTLE LIARS BURN FIRST, and who then pours turpentine over their bodies and ignites them. Newly divorced by his upward-mobile actressy wife, Shepard is impotent and drinking far, far too much following his being hounded out of the Los Angeles Police Department by the press for having killed a 16-year-old black teenager who had just stabbed Shepard's partner. Complicating his return to Laguna is the fact that his father, now a TV preacher with a drive-in movie church, is that town's former police chief. When Tom was only four months old, his father Wade found his tennis friend Azul Mercante raping Tom's mother, and in a fight over Wade's pistol she was killed and Mercante later given a long jail term. Or was she being raped? Now, when a heavy-drinking old stable-owner and gambler is found with his head bashed in, a thousand dollars in bills stuffed down his throat and his outer body burned black, Shepard approaches the victim's chilly daughter Jane for help. Once he overcomes her archness, he begins uncovering motiveless malignancies that seem to lead him directly into his own past, his father's earlier alcoholism and born-again recovery and that tie to a fabulous beach club. . . While the story is grippingly plotted and has an aura of ancestral horror, its real hook comes from brilliantly original dialogue and Shepard's reactions to the varied violence he meets: he bleeds, gets concussions, is repelled and made watery-kneed by both the dead and the living and is always intensely present on the page. He's not at all sure he's cut out for this work. Not the least of the story's merits is its utter familiarity with police work and the absorbing logic of detection. Then there are the pungently defined, sometimes movingly human characters (especially his father, a solid-gold Christian in a Sophoclean darkness), the mid-August heat and glittery scene-painting of chic Laguna Beach under turquoise California skies. Writerly and memorable.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1985
ISBN: 0312952058
Page Count: 340
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1985
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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