The Christmas festivities planned by Mara, a "Brehon" who dispenses justice in 16th-century Ireland, are spoiled by the murder of a fellow judge.
Although Mara (Sting of Justice, 2009, etc.) normally works in Burren, Christmas 1519 finds her and her scholars at the Castle of Bunratty at Thomond, the principal seat of her husband, King Turlough Donn O’Brien, who’s celebrating 20 years of rule. The connubial reunion is welcome, for although the royal couple have been married for 10 years and have a lively young son, they often spend long periods apart. Turlough is a genial man and a good soldier, but his succession is jeopardized by Conor, his oldest son, who’s sickly and unlikely to be accepted by his people. Mara quickly realizes that the unpleasant undercurrents she’s picked up are connected to Brehon MacClancy, whose statements contain subtle threats against unknown enemies of the king. When MacClancy is discovered dead in a room filled with some of the king’s closest friends and several observant children, Mara resolves to find the killer. Brehon law has a set fine for every offense. Even murder is punishable by fines, not physical punishment. Mara has the unpleasant duty of questioning people she knows well. Even one of her former scholars has a motive for killing the unpopular old man. A vicious attack on Mara by an assailant who leaves her for dead makes it clear that the killer will stop at nothing to escape detection.
The information on Brehon law that prefaces each chapter adds historical interest to this diverting mystery, even if Mara is no match for Peter Tremayne’s seventh-century Brehon Sister Fidelma.
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8378-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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