A multilayered tale that builds slowly—the use of smells is especially effective—but drives to a shattering climax that...
Sigurdardóttir’s work (The Day Is Dark, 2013, etc.) has always drawn on both kinds of mysteries—detective stories in which everything is explained rationally and supernatural thrillers in which it isn’t—but this tale of a series of disappearances grounded in long-simmering revenge mixes the two more inextricably than ever before.
Freyr, a consulting psychiatrist who’s been called to the scene of a schoolroom that’s been vandalized, finds nothing unusual about the way it’s been trashed and defaced by the word “dirty,” until he learns that the same thing happened to the same room 60 years ago. This apparent coincidence is rendered even more uncanny when Halla, a pensioner who was traumatized as a schoolchild by the earlier incident, hangs herself from a church ceiling—and when Freyr and his lover, Dagný, a police detective, learn of the high mortality rate among Halla’s classmates, none of whom died from natural causes. Meanwhile, in remote Hesteyri, an unemployed Reykjavík MBA, his schoolteacher wife and their widowed friend, who plan to rehab a disused building as a guesthouse, have a series of increasingly creepy run-ins with what seems to be a young boy’s ghost. Crosscutting between the two stories, Sigurdardóttir counterpoints the progress of the investigation into the schoolroom vandalism and its implications with the deterioration of the relations among the three rehabbers, whose encounters with the ghost become more dangerous as they learn more and more unwelcome news about each other. By the time one of them vanishes, Freyr’s realization that the vandalism case, which you’d think would be altogether safer, is linked to his own diabetic son’s more recent disappearance turns his investigation into an anguished search for the truth of his own life.
A multilayered tale that builds slowly—the use of smells is especially effective—but drives to a shattering climax that honors the traditions of both detective fiction and ghost stories.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04562-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
