Hall outdoes her stellar debut in an exploration of vile secrets that pays homage to that earlier master of complex...
When a house goes up in flames in the dead of the night with a woman and her two children inside, is it accident or murder?
Good thing that African-American homicide detective Elouise “Lou” Norton is a very clever cop with deep ties in her community that will serve her well in her new case. It’s up to her and her annoying white LAPD partner, Colin Taggert, to determine whether the fire that killed Juliet Chatman and her children, Cody and Chloe, was meant to cover up a murder. The fire was definitely arson. Hostile, troubled Cody had been setting a lot of fires lately, but autopsies revealed that both Juliet and the children had Valium in their systems, and Juliet had advanced ovarian cancer. Why did Juliet have a gun clutched in her hand and a car packed with suitcases for her and the children? And what to make of her garbled 911 call about someone killing her? Juliet’s husband, Christopher, a commodities broker who works odd hours, left for work, returned during the fire, and had to be tackled by the firemen to keep him outside. Lou recently took back her own cheating husband, Greg—handsome, wealthy, and deeply untrustworthy—after the body of her sister, murdered long ago, was finally found (Land of Shadows, 2014). Her partner and her boss wonder if her marital problems are coloring her perception of Christopher, an inveterate liar. Christopher's neighbor and best friend, Ben Oliver, an insurance lawyer whom Christopher recently tapped for a loan, is immediately on the scene. Even if Juliet and Christopher have been big spenders, she can’t imagine how they went through the $3 million his parents left him. Every day brings unsettling discoveries, more questions, and further complications that force Lou to confront her own worst fears.
Hall outdoes her stellar debut in an exploration of vile secrets that pays homage to that earlier master of complex California homicide, Raymond Chandler.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3636-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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