“Someone always gets punished when a crime is committed,” one character observes bitterly, “but not always the guilty...
As in The Silence of the Sea (2016), Iceland’s Queen of Crime juggles two sets of crimes in two time frames to produce a slow-burning, bone-chilling tale. Following the fatal heart attack of his co-worker Róberta Gunnarsdóttir, Ódinn Hafsteinsson, trained as a dispassionate engineer, is asked to take over her investigative report on the half-century history of the Krókur care home for troubled young men. Ódinn, already presented as dying along with his 11-year-old daughter, Rún, in the prologue, soon follows Róberta in zeroing in on the deaths of Einar Allen and Thorbjörn Jónasson, two Krókur boys who were found in a car dead of carbon monoxide poisoning some 40 years ago. As Ódinn, who’s been on edge ever since the sudden death of his ex-wife, Lára Karlsdóttir, left him the sole guardian of Rún, begins to piece together different accounts of the case, the author takes a shortcut ahead of him, going directly back to the January day in 1974 when Einar first arrives at Krókur. Cleaning woman Aldís Agnarsdóttir instantly suspects that he’s much too old to have been placed there—in fact, he turns out to be 18, legally an adult—but that sharp perception doesn’t stop her from falling under his sway, since they’re both in different ways victims of Veigar and Lilja, the home’s tyrannical owners and mismanagers. As the two stories proceed in alternating chapters whose movement is as inexorable as that of the Titanic and the iceberg, the past will turn out to resonate in Ódinn’s investigation in ways that are as unexpected as they are shattering, with shocking new complications still foretold in the story’s final paragraphs.
“Someone always gets punished when a crime is committed,” one character observes bitterly, “but not always the guilty party.”Rest assured that the guilty and the innocent alike will share every punishment Sigurdardóttir can dish out.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10740-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
© 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.
