As Thomas shifts the focus of his period franchise (Old Scores, 2017, etc.) to a second-fiddle investigator, his hero...
An assistant detective in Victorian London finally makes his mark.
Thomas Llewelyn, a Welshman with a checkered past, must put aside his plans to marry Jewish widow Rebecca Cowan when the office of his boss, Cyrus Barker, is blown up and Barker winds up in the hospital with a badly broken leg. Llewelyn pores through the ruins, gathering the case files he hopes will pinpoint which of the many criminals Barker has put away may have taken revenge. The dust has hardly settled when Llewelyn is visited by Camille Archer, who claims her husband has gone missing. Suspicious of her story, he follows her, but she gives him the slip. His next surprise visitor is Caleb Barker, Cyrus’ long-lost brother, who works for the Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency. Their meeting begins with a fistfight that leaves each with respect but no love for each other. As Caleb settles into Cyrus' house and spends most of his time working on his brother's caseload, even though Cyrus never asked for his help, Llewelyn doggedly tracks down all the people from their past cases who are still alive to seek revenge. He hires a female detective to track down Camille Archer, who’s now visited Rebecca claiming to be Llewelyn’s sister. The American Embassy wants to get Caleb out of the country, but he evades them and joins Llewelyn as he interviews the suspects in the bombing. Llewelyn’s dreams of marriage are seriously threatened when he’s forced to shoot two people who’ve invaded Rebecca’s home right in front of her and her Aunt Lydia, possibly the only relative who approves of the upcoming nuptials.
As Thomas shifts the focus of his period franchise (Old Scores, 2017, etc.) to a second-fiddle investigator, his hero gathers confidence through every step of a dangerous case.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17038-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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