Worst feature: too many similar plot twists. Best: the sharply characteristic voices that emerge from all these tales.
An anthology celebrating 21 years of writing by Northern England’s Murder Squad with 21 stories, eight of them new.
The celebration is largely a private affair, with long-standing members Ann Cleeves, Kate Ellis, Margaret Murphy, Chris Simms, Cath Staincliffe, and editor Edwards contributing three entries apiece. Of the remaining stories by former Squad members, John Baker’s “An Old-Fashioned Poisoning” shows a Victorian woman celebrating the passing of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by arranging another death; the police officer in Chaz Brenchley’s “For Kicks” uncovers a lifelong pattern of abuse in the case of a teenager kicked into a coma; and the thrill killer in the late Stuart Pawson’s “Ultra Violent” is brought to justice by a highly predictable mistake. None of these outliers can match the best stories by the current Squad members. In Staincliffe’s “Scorpion,” another abused teenager strikes back at a shockingly unexpected target. “A Winter’s Tale” is Cleeves’ routine but expert probe into the murder of a rural woman with a reputation. The gangster’s widow in Edwards’ “The Other Life” comes home from a séance arranged by her cleaning lady to find that two of her late husband’s colleagues have targeted her home for robbery. The officer who solves the locked-room poisoning in Ellis’ “My Oleander” wastes no time in applying the lessons he’s learned on the homefront. Simms’ “Gaffed” follows a high-stakes meeting between an informant whose wife’s death freed him from a gang’s blackmail and the officer who’s promised him protection to its logical conclusion. And a pair of hospital patients battling formidable handicaps in Murphy’s “Still Life” turn to battle each other till they work toward a resolution as welcome as it is unlikely.
Worst feature: too many similar plot twists. Best: the sharply characteristic voices that emerge from all these tales.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9093-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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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