An engaging, if sometimes dauntingly complex, whodunit.
In McCarthy and Dohar’s thriller, an ex-cleric and his friend must solve a poetic puzzle that may be connected to multiple murders.
Myles Dunn, a former Jesuit priest (and “self-professed adrenaline junky…who happens to be a polyglot with an advanced degree in world religions”), is lured back to his alma mater by his “one-time fellow Jesuit and best mate,” Jeremy Strand, with an email that promises the solution to a mystery. Upon his arrival in Oxford, England, from Colorado, he finds a community rattled by the horrific murder of an altar boy, which bigots believe was committed by someone from the local Muslim immigrant community. Strand, an esoteric Jesuit and poetry scholar, has discovered a hidden meaning in one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ lost “dark” sonnets. Specifically, he believes that Hopkins, a fellow Jesuit and brilliant and idiosyncratic Victorian poet, wrote this poem in an effort to reveal the “quasi-historical legend” of the Cuxham Chalice, a priceless artifact from the time of the Lumen, a secret religious sect founded during the reign of King Henry VIII. When Strand goes missing—and another murder, similar to the first, is committed—Myles and Oxford librarian Eva Bashir must race to solve the poetic riddle and find out who’s behind the crimes. They soon discover that the culprit will go to any length to keep their secret hidden. Fans of Dan Brown’s historical thrillers, particularly the bestselling The Da Vinci Code(2003), are likely to best appreciate McCarthy and Dohar’s dive into the complex and mysterious history of “the self-proclaimed ‘keepers of the Grail.’ ” The plot’s use of the work of Hopkins, a complicated author who often invented his own words, gives readers a clever character to explore. However, the intricate poetic devices at play, which include reverse acrostics, sprung rhythm, sestets, and octets, may be confusing to those who are unfamiliar with serious study of formal poetry. That said, it remains an intriguing thriller to the end.
An engaging, if sometimes dauntingly complex, whodunit.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 426
Publisher: De Profundis Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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
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