Quite a departure for Virgil and Lucas, but this is not a case that plays to their considerable strengths.
Virgil Flowers (Mad River, 2012, etc.) chases after a biblical relic that turns every person whose path it crosses into a criminal.
Lutheran minister Elijah Jones has lived a long time without stepping over the line. But the inscribed stele that turns up on the Israeli archaeological dig on which he’s a volunteer is too much of a temptation for even a dying man like Jones to resist. Sneaking off with the priceless relic, he high-tails it home to Mankato for the express purpose, it would seem, of presenting Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension with a new challenge. And quite a challenge it is, because what’s engraved on the stele is so controversial that it’s avidly sought by Yael Aronov, of the Israeli Antiquities Authority; Mossad killer Tal Zahavi; Turkish torturer Timur Kaya; TV archaeologist Tag Bauer; professor John Rogers Sewicky, who teaches ancient mysteries classes at the University of Texas; Lebanese college student Faraj Awad, who may or may not be a liaison for Hezbollah; assorted Beltway types who decline to identify their government agencies; and several lesser fry, from Elijah’s daughter Ellen Case to counterfeit lumber merchant Florence “Ma” Nobles, who are both presumably just out for the money. The wholesale pursuit of the relic by everyone in the Central time zone carries serious comic potential, but Sandford, unlike Elijah, sticks to the straight and narrow as he conscientiously follows everyone who’s embarked on this treasure hunt. The effect is to muffle Virgil and his senior colleague Lucas Davenport (Silken Prey, 2013, etc.) without creating anyone equally engaging to take their places.
Quite a departure for Virgil and Lucas, but this is not a case that plays to their considerable strengths.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15930-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
