Brown (Solace, 2012, etc.) has cleverly and ironically woven a second narrative of the cruel past into the present. The...
A tale of past and present South Africa that exposes the dark underbelly of the country’s history.
Now that his downward spiral into drink and drugs has ruined his marriage, veteran mixed-race police detective Eberard Februarie, deeply depressed, has transferred to the little city of Stellenbosch, hoping at least to salvage his career. Eberard must visit a counselor regularly in order to keep his position. When Melanie Du Preez, a young white woman, is found floating in the river, he gets the case. A massive blow to the head would have killed her had she not drowned. She may have been raped as well. Melanie’s father is a respected law lecturer at the university whose arrogant, outspoken support for protecting Afrikaans culture has ruffled some feathers. Apartheid may be over, but racism still runs rampant. Eberard’s partner, bright young Constable Xoliswa Nduku, wants to make a career for herself in the police force. Their search discloses a scrapbook of nursery rhymes Melanie kept, with some of the later items torn out. As they look into her background, they find that she’s visited a club featuring alcohol, drugs and loud music with sexual undertones. Eberard arrests the bouncer, a Burundian in the country illegally, who’s been seen with Melanie. But before he can be questioned, the professor comes to the jail pretending to be his lawyer and shoots him. Although the Burundian’s semen has been found in Melanie, the club owner pushes a reluctant Eberard, who is sinking back into his old ways, to continue his investigation. With Nduku’s encouragement, he turns up some deeply disturbing possibilities.
Brown (Solace, 2012, etc.) has cleverly and ironically woven a second narrative of the cruel past into the present. The mystery takes a back seat in this beautifully crafted scenario of hatred, intolerance and courage.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03599-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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