An explosive second outing for Jane Whitefield, the Senecan specialist in helping people disappear (Vanishing Act, 1995). The story kicks off with a whoosh as Jane succeeds in saving the life of her latest client, eight-year-old Timothy Phillips, by producing him in an L.A. court that's about to declare him dead so that whoever's been plundering his trust fund can breathe easy. Once Timmy's story is read into the record, he's safe, but it's been a high-casualty operation, and Jane's in no mood for getting accosted at the airport by Mary Perkins, who begs Jane to help her elude the killers following her. It isn't until the two women are halfway across the country that Jane has the time to hear Mary's story: During the unregulated '80s, she bilked unwary banks of millions through a pyramid of lovingly detailed real- estate schemes, and now that she's already done time for the feds, who weren't able to shake the money loose from her, some monstrous freelancer has decided to take a turn. Jane gets Mary parked in a new town with shiny new credit cards, and even takes a few days back in her upstate New York hometown to entertain a marriage proposal from her hitherto platonic friend Dr. Carey McKinnon, but then it's back to business as she goes after the trustee who's been looting Timmy Phillips's estate. The looting, though, turns out to be even deeper and deadlier than she imagined—and it naturally leads her straight back to Mary and the ominous, insatiable security firm that's getting closer and closer to her. The plotting is a miracle of unrelenting tension; the breathless, knowing prose is pitch-perfect; and Jane's fierce righteousness is perfectly balanced by a mind-boggling wealth of detail about how to plunder trusts, defraud banks, and disappear. Five more of Jane's adventures are already stockpiled for annual release. Truly a treasure for Random—as long as they never let the peerlessly devious author get behind them. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44911-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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