Proficient but routine work.
Two brand-new novellas and two reprinted short stories test the semiretired Nameless Detective’s ability to close cases—and the gentle reader’s taste for new wine in old bottles.
The two brief reprints both involve serendipitous discoveries. In “Grapplin’,” Nameless (Vixen, 2015, etc.), who’s signed on to help a long-estranged uncle search for his missing niece, is surprised to solve a 50-year-old double murder along the way. The even shorter “Nightscape” finds Nameless and his operative Jake Runyon sitting in a diner hoping to catch the scent of a deadbeat dad and ends with their bagging “two violent, abusive fathers in the space of about three minutes.” The title novella follows an even curvier path. Nameless, working a rare case himself out in Rio Verdi, begins by collecting statements from witnesses to an auto accident involving San Francisco businessman Arthur Clements, then takes a macabre turn when his search for one more witness leads him to the bodies of two men who’ve apparently shot each other in an argument over drugs. Newly widowed Doreen Fentress, convinced that her Ray wasn’t that kind of man, hires Nameless to find out the truth about him, and to her sorrow, that’s exactly what he does. The client in “Revenant,” suburban stockbroker Peter Erskine, is literally spooked by the effects of another car crash. Elza Vok, the Lithuanian Satanist who plowed into Erskine’s car, cursed him on his deathbed, and now Erskine and his ailing wife, Marian, are both convinced that an evil spirit has assumed Vok’s physical form to haunt them. Pronzini tries to end on the same ambivalent note as John Dickson Carr’s classic novel The Burning Court but doesn’t quite pull it off.
Proficient but routine work.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8103-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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