``Everything will come in twos,'' announces geomancer Bouc Bel- Air to Paul Bergman, one of the placidly nondescript heroes of this waggish fantasia circling vaguely around themes of lost love, friendship, wandering, and curiously weightless felony—most of them appearing, yes, in twos. Let's see, now. Paul and his friend Bob, both in languid romantic pursuit of Justine Fischer, run afoul of comic-opera Belgian ganglord Lucien Van Os and his witless hangers-on Plankaert and Toon—who press them into running guns on the ailing steamer Boustrophedon, bound from Le Havre for Malaya, where Paul's uncle Jeff Pons (``the Duke'') has been maintaining his power as overseer of the Jouvin rubber plantation by encouraging the Aw brothers, Aw Sam and Aw Aw, to organize a labor movement just efficacious enough to be menacing. Meanwhile, Jeff and his longtime friend Charles Pontiac—who's gone underground in the Metro, surfacing only to pick up his laundry—are linked by their pursuit 30 years since of Justine's mother Nicole, who rejected them both for an aviator who promptly crashed near the Duke's plantation. (Any questions so far?) Despite a plot that includes a mutiny and a counter-mutiny, a bank robbery, two kidnappings, and a touching reunion between the Duke and his long-lost nephew, every melodramatic incident is served up with an understated spin that cancels it out, and the characters, in all their undying friendship and unrequited passion, have no more solidity than Baby Love, Nicole's Pekingese—so that it's not really surprising when Paul, rescued by Charles and Bob, agrees to give his kidnapper a lift back to the 14th arrondissement. Full of little twists and crackles of linguistic static, courtesy of Echenoz and his faithful translator, that stand in for the traditional rewards of the narrative contract—very much in the elaborately inconsequential manner of Echenoz's apparently one-of-a- kind Cherokee (1987). Raymond Queneau, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87923-916-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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