It helps to know something about the time in which the story is set, and who Olof Palme was, to appreciate the book. Still,...
Dark, politically charged thriller from Swedish crime writer Persson (Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, 2010), one of many literary heirs of Stieg Larsson.
Anyone who was alive and kicking in 1975 is likely a much different person today, if in no other way than that the platform shoes and disco ball are now in storage. Certainly a person’s politics might be different—and attitudes about others, too, especially if you are, say, a Norwegian put into contact with Germans within living memory of the Nazi occupation. Persson’s newest starts off smack in the middle of a not uncommon scene in the Europe of 1975: a cadre of terrorists has seized the German embassy in Stockholm, demanding the release of prisoners, including members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Things get ugly quickly; as the head of the homicide squad idly thinks, “The promised effects of the Stockholm syndrome, this good, consoling cigar, seemed more remote than ever.” A few hours in, and hostages and terrorists die. Or did they? The operation was so carefully planned that, it stands to reason, someone well placed both inside and outside the embassy had to have been in on it. Red herrings—perhaps better, Red Brigades herrings—ensue, as Persson unfolds a carefully plotted story that jumps to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, then to the near-present, crossing generations of investigators and government officials in the quest to find out who knew what—and who covered up what, and who killed whom. People change with the years—and they don’t. Persson himself figures in the proceedings, in the sly way that Alfred Hitchcock figured in his films. And while there’s humor, if mostly black—let “The one who had ended his life by his own hand and with the help of his service revolver to save society unnecessary nursing expenses and himself an undignified life” stand as a fairly typical example—Persson writes with unrelenting grimness, as if needing a strong dose of Mediterranean sunshine to cure the police-beat blues.
It helps to know something about the time in which the story is set, and who Olof Palme was, to appreciate the book. Still, a practiced, Larsson-worthy procedural.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-37746-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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