This vibrant first installment of a detective series should leave readers looking forward to more adventures with the...
Two murders fester under the blazing heat of a Southern sun, a testament that keeping secrets can be deadly in this historical mystery.
In 1932, Bead Baker is beaten to death by an unknown assailant. The unsolved murder and subsequent gossip tear through the town of Homeville for generations. Forty years later, the battered body of Bead’s granddaughter, Little Mary, is discovered on her front porch. Cotton Lee Penn was Mary’s friend. Cotton is pretty but also straightforward, unconventional, and walks with a limp, the result of a childhood bout with polio. Attorney Max Mayfair, retained by Little Mary’s fiance to clear his name, turns to Cotton for investigative assistance (“I’m hiring the smartest white person in Sussex County”). Her ability to skirt the bounds of acceptability and manipulate the pity of the townspeople allows Cotton to ask questions others cannot. She examines both crimes, convinced they’re related, as the narrative jumps between the 1930s and the 1970s. The suspects in Cotton’s time all have ties to the crime committed decades earlier. Did Sharp Dorn, the local minister who was a philanderer and abuser, kill Bead for putting ideas in his wife Verdie’s head? Did Dorn’s son, Ron, kill Little Mary? Or was it the hired help Zed Omen in 1932 and his grandson, Doug, in 1972? Cotton must wade through the layers of time and battle the tides of racism and sexism to find the truth and solve both puzzles. In this absorbing series opener, Lowe (In Albuquerque, Abandoned, 2016, etc.) brings the sultry South in both decades vividly to life. The acceptability of violence, especially toward women, is a shocking reality. Racism leads to false accusations, including a lynching following Bead’s death. The author does an admirable job of tying the two eras and two crimes together. She deftly drops a trail of crumbs from suspect to suspect, leading the reader down multiple paths before revealing the surprising truth in a climax worth waiting for. Cotton is an appealing protagonist, an unlikely choice for a sleuth in the rural South of the early ’70s.
This vibrant first installment of a detective series should leave readers looking forward to more adventures with the engaging heroine.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5428-2072-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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