A picture would have been worth a thousand words.
A photojournalist poking around in an abandoned house discovers a room covered in mysterious wall-to-wall paintings.
Photography teacher Jason Poe, suffering from the trauma of documenting the carnage of the war in Syria, opts for a somewhat tamer enterprise back home: breaking into derelict houses in the Rust Belt and taking pictures of the possessions owners left behind when they decamped. The granite mansion on Locust Street in the little town of Calista holds particular fascination for him. When he and his student Tally Vaughan finally sneak inside, their patience is richly rewarded. In a room at the top of the building is a set of four murals, painted by a talented but obviously untrained artist, that Poe finds breathtaking. To identify the creator of this unknown masterpiece, Poe seeks help from fiber artist Hannah Sachs, his colleague at the Calista Art Institute and his sometime lover, and reporter Joan Nguyen of the Calista Times-Dispatch. Nguyen fills him in on the history of the house, which was abandoned after Elizabeth and Theodore Schechtner, a pair of psychotherapists, were accused of leading a cult that imprisoned teenage girls there. Hannah helps track down the art dealer who currently owns the house—and the murals. The mystery behind the murals’ creation, which takes several trips to Santa Fe and Switzerland to unravel, couldn’t be more predictable. Bayer (The Luzern Photograph, 2016, etc.), who presents his tale as a series of first-person narratives told by the searchers and their informants, doesn’t differentiate them enough to give each character a unique voice. But the most notable absence is of the murals themselves, which are described by a variety of encomiums but never in enough detail for readers to imagine what they’re not seeing.
A picture would have been worth a thousand words.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8973-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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