Unfortunately, the extended back story this time is neither surprising nor particularly interesting. Fans who’d like to see...
Danish nurse Nina Borg’s fourth brush with crime begins with a scene in which she’s savagely struck down by an oddly apologetic killer, and then it gets worse and worse.
Nina’s come to Viborg to tend to her mother, who’s been diagnosed with cancer. Relations between the two have been strained ever since Nina discovered the body of her father, a suicide, when she was 12. Now she’s going to need all the reserves of strength she can summon, because it looks as if the attack that almost killed her was neither a robbery attempt nor a random crime of opportunity. And Nina hasn’t even been released from the hospital before she starts getting flowers and obscure notes quoting Scripture (“His peace passeth understanding”), some of them signed “Victor.” Readers know even before Nina who hulking Victor is: with poor Vincent Bernardo and wealthy Vadim Lorenzo, he’s one of “the V-team,” three medical students who entered Manila’s St. Francis College of Medicine together four years earlier. When too much partying sinks Vincent’s grades, he loses his scholarship. Vadim, meanwhile, is expelled for cheating, starts a construction firm, and offers Vincent a job, or, more precisely, a position in his private game of Simon Says. As in Nina’s last case (Death of a Nightingale, 2013), the principal interest comes from watching the interspersed flashbacks to the Philippines catch up to a present that holds threats and danger for both Nina and her lover, Søren Kirkegard, who’s been placed on leave from his police job by a boss who has no idea how much more damage he’s going to sustain this time around.
Unfortunately, the extended back story this time is neither surprising nor particularly interesting. Fans who’d like to see Nina do something more than absorb a series of brutal attacks may want to wait for the next installment.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61695-528-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2015
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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