Cholera and worse strike New Orleans in 1833 in this hectic, dankly atmospheric sequel to A Free Man of Color (1997). Benjamin January, the freed slave who practiced surgery for six years in Paris but makes his living back home as a piano player, is already exhausted from tending the sick in Charity Hospital and arguing with the self-regarding white medicos about the efficacy of bleeding the tormented victims of “Bronze Jack” when he’s accosted by Cora Chouteau, a manumitted servant who begs him to help her reunite with her new husband Gervase, the houseman who’s disappeared into the house of his new masters, Delphine and Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie. Before January can tell Cora that he’s arranged a meeting with Gervase, she’s disappeared too—pursued by a story that she poisoned her own master and mistress. Emily Redfern recovers sufficiently to accuse Cora of stealing $5,000 and a string of pearls; alleged rapist Otis Redfern is beyond recovery. The town’s feelings, easy prey for any rumor that will deflect the citizens from the epidemic that everybody recognizes but the newspapers never mention, swiftly turn against Cora. But January has hardly a moment to spare for her when he’s called to Rose Vitrac’s ravaged little school, and from there to the side of his ailing, pregnant sister. Two patterns emerge from Hambly’s darkly vivid swirl of subplots: Friends of January’s family, especially dark-skinned freedmen, are disappearing, perhaps claimed by Bronze Jack, perhaps victims of a more human predator; and the gap between what the citizens know and what they admit, between the secrets they’re privy to and the blame they’re eager to cast—old Creole families to parvenus, landowners and slaves alike to freedmen—widens alarmingly. The shortcomings of Hambly’s mystery plot—the culprits are too obvious and too many—strengthen her sense of a grim, miasmal conspiracy between human monsters and nature gone mad.
Pub Date: July 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10254-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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