More grisly but more routine than Kaaberbøl and Friis’ striking debut, and just as sordid in its revelations about Denmark...
Denmark’s normal cycle of stealing, smuggling, forced prostitution and unauthorized aid to minority populations is disrupted by the exhumation of a truly malign object.
Jørgen Skou-Larsen is a retired building inspector concerned about his wife Helle’s thoroughly irresponsible financial behavior. Sándor Horváth is a law student from Budapest obsessed with passing his upcoming oral exam. Søren Kirkegård is a chief inspector in counterterrorism. And Nina Borg, familiar to American readers from The Boy in the Suitcase (2011), is a Red Cross nurse working in the Coal House Camp and secretly moonlighting with the underground Network that does what it can to ease the lives of the Roma who’ve found their way to Denmark. The first hints of trouble come with shocking suddenness: Nina’s fellow Networker, Peter Erhardsen, an engineer with the city of Copenhagen, is taken violently and mysteriously ill with a malady that seems to have swept through the Roma community, and Sándor is arrested by police officers who are clearly convinced that he’s his stepbrother, Tamás Rézmüves. The source of these problems is a sinister prize Tamás and his pal Pitkin have scavenged from an abandoned hospital building back in Hungary and arranged to sell in the global marketplace. Their scheme entangles not only them, but the rest of the cast with international sex traffickers and homegrown terrorists, pits each group of do-gooders against the others, and puts Nina and her family in particular under unimaginable pressure from some uncompromisingly evil malefactors. The pattern behind the calamity becomes clear early on, but the final indications of how the puzzle pieces dovetail will hit most readers as a shocking surprise.
More grisly but more routine than Kaaberbøl and Friis’ striking debut, and just as sordid in its revelations about Denmark today and tomorrow.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61695-170-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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