A disjointed work.
Messy detective story with a sharp, self-important political agenda set during the Zapatista revolt, co-written by insurgency leader Marcos and Spanish-Mexican novelist Taibo.
The pair alternate chapters and pursue individual storylines that more or less converge at the end with the bad guy’s apprehension. Marcos follows the mission of 61-year-old Zapatista warrior Elías Contreras, sent by “El Sup”—Marcos writing about himself in the third person—into the “Monster” (Mexico City) to “pick up city ways.” Elías’s folksy, plainspoken narrative conveys the Zapatistas’ political philosophy; he offers brief biographies of some members of this group from the mountains of southeast Mexico made up largely of indigenous peoples and internationals. Taibo, for his part, brings back Héctor Balascoarán Shayne, the one-eyed Mexico City detective familiar from Taibo’s own mystery series (Return to the Same City, 1996, etc.), who has been receiving cryptic, paranoid messages on his answering machine from Jesús María Alvarado, a former buddy and political prisoner who was murdered in 1969. Is the caller Alvarado’s son, or his ghost? Whoever the voice belongs to, his messages implicate a corrupt character named Morales, a guerrilla-turned-official who disappeared during the Dirty War waged by previous governments (not that the current one is portrayed here as any better). Alerted by El Sup to the menace of Morales’s possible reappearance, Elías runs into Balascoarán in Mexico City, and the two set out in pursuit. The plot swiftly devolves into a detailed rehashing of insurgent maneuvering over the decades, topped by a veritable bludgeoning litany of “the bad and the evil,” according to authorities ranging from Don Quixote to Leonard Peltier.
A disjointed work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-933354-07-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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