Readers who aren’t put off by the Hollywood pacing, with action set pieces less like Conan Doyle than the Robert Downey Jr....
A Sherlockian pastiche without Holmes and Watson? Yes indeed, and it’s a tour de force quite unlike any other fruit from these densely plowed fields.
It is 1891. Holmes and professor James Moriarty are both presumed dead after hurtling over Reichenbach Falls, though the only body that’s been recovered is thought to be that of a chef at the Englischer Hof. The Pinkerton Detective Agency has sent operative Frederick Chase to England to investigate rumors that Clarence Devereux, fresh from his triumphantly lucrative scheme to manipulate stock prices by sending false information over Western Union wires, has come to join Moriarty in an Anglo-American criminal empire—and, finding the Napoleon of crime deceased, has stayed to become his successor. Joining forces with DI Athelney Jones, whose admiration of Holmes is just this side of idolatry, Chase tries to trace the agoraphobic Devereux through his lieutenants Edgar and Leland Mortlake and safecracker Scotchy Lavelle. The only results of their search are a series of violent reprisals, and when they finally catch up with Devereux at a function hosted by American legate (and president’s son) Robert Todd Lincoln, he turns the tables on them with insolent ease, leaving them both scurrying to hang on to their jobs. Since Jones talks and acts just like Holmes and Chase is every bit as enterprising as Dr. Watson, they seem likely to run their quarry to earth, with pauses along the way for lightning deductions and a drastically compressed sequel to “The Red-Headed League.” But canny Sherlock-ian Horowitz (The House of Silk, 2011, etc.) still has more tricks up his sleeve.
Readers who aren’t put off by the Hollywood pacing, with action set pieces less like Conan Doyle than the Robert Downey Jr. movies, are in for a rare treat, a mystery as original as it is enthralling.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-237718-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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