An engrossing detective story teeming with memorable characters.
A Jewish man intent upon proving his girlfriend innocent of murder unearths dark secrets about his own religious community in Segal’s mystery novel.
Newly divorced Jake Cooper leaves behind his Ultra-Orthodox religious lifestyle, remaining Jewish but joining “modern society” in Chicago. He soon connects with Mindy Stein, who’s entangled in a contentious divorce with her husband, Sender. When Sender inexplicably plunges from a rooftop, the death stirs up questions: Was it suicide or murder, and, if the latter, did Mindy, now under arrest, push him? Meanwhile, an intruder ransacks apartments searching for a mysterious manuscript. Jake’s amateur investigation digs up surprises, from details surrounding Sender’s father’s alleged suicide years ago to local rabbis involved in shady dealings; apparently, every community harbors its share of thugs willing to use violence to get what they want. The author develops an exceptional cast, including Jake’s muscular and shrewd friend Pinky and the colorful baddies that crop up. Segal deftly incorporates Jewish beliefs and customs without demonizing the religion itself. Missing dialogue tags unfortunately make several conversational scenes early in the narrative hard to follow. Once those tags begin to appear, however, Jake’s rounds of questionings really pop (“Mrs. Goldstein told us that she heard more than one voice on the roof. Unless Sender had two personalities and was talking to himself, that points to at least one other person being present when he flew off the roof. If Sender was jumping, wouldn’t he prefer to do that in private? Why would he want someone watching him?”) and enliven the story’s pace. The novel’s central mystery remains consistently engaging as Jake goes back and forth between suspects—even Mindy is a potential killer. The final act wraps up the story convincingly and satisfyingly, and the denouement implies that Jake and his sleuthing skills will return.
An engrossing detective story teeming with memorable characters.Pub Date: March 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781959802075
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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