A thin mystery with forgettable suspects and a tangled conclusion make this one of Reverend Mother’s lesser efforts.
A fifth case for Reverend Mother Aquinas, of St. Mary’s of the Isle Convent, strikes shockingly close to home.
Newcomer Sister Gertrude’s ample figure and fondness for sweets might have doomed her to health problems in her declining years if she hadn’t died at 22 in the convent’s hen shed. Since dealing with the deceased already plays so large a role in Reverend Mother’s ministry (A Gruesome Discovery, 2018, etc.), she’s able to maintain her decorum and keep her wits about her as she slowly and patiently gathers information about the circumstances leading up to the novice’s death. Sister Gertrude had been ill following yesterday evening’s meal, where she’d eaten exactly the same thing as Sister Bernadette, Sister Mary Immaculate, and all the rest. The cause of death was alcohol poisoning even though Sister Gertrude was dead set against drinking. Does her demise have some connection to that of her father, prosperous factory executive John Donovan, whose liver failed him only a few months ago and who left his entire estate to Gertrude’s sister, Betty Kelly? Or are larger-scale forces at work here, forces that have revealed themselves most recently in the links between the Irish language lessons Sister Brigid and Sister Joan, two other novices, were taking at St. Ita’s School and an explosion Sinn Féin contrived that’s destroyed the considerable arsenal on Spike Island? While everyone else in 1925 Cork has the luxury of fretting over the troubled relationship between the infant Irish Free State and the hated English, Reverend Mother, with the help of former Sinn Féin member Eileen MacSweeney and Inspector Patrick Cashman, must struggle to determine how, or whether, this latest fatality fits into a larger pattern.
A thin mystery with forgettable suspects and a tangled conclusion make this one of Reverend Mother’s lesser efforts.Pub Date: July 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8783-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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