Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter.
Life in contemporary Ireland is bracketed in these 12 tales—all but one of them reprints—by the experiences of young people who’ve scarcely tasted it and veterans who wish they hadn’t.
Neville’s foreword notes the pleasure he takes in writing stories that provide a break from the long-haul commitments of his novels. But that break is severely limited by both the stories’ thematic consistency and their recycling of characters and plotlines from the novels. The six stories in “New Monsters,” the first part of the collection, focus on innocents, mostly children, forced all too early in life to confront the ghosts of the past. A boy struggles to deal with the sudden absence of his mother in “Coming in on Time.” The title character of “Echo” is defined by his uncanny bond to the sister who died before he was born. “London Safe” tracks a grown man’s ill-fated reunion with the father who left him as a child. In the second part, “Old Friends,” the focus shifts to the ghosts themselves, dead-eyed souls like IRA hard case Gerry Fegan (last seen in The Ghosts of Belfast, 2009) and aging killer Albert Ryan (from Ratlines, 2013), who can’t forget the violent roles they’ve taken in the Troubles. Child and ghost collide most memorably in The Traveller, the concluding novella, in which Ellen McKenna, the daughter of pensioned cop Jack Lennon (from The Final Silence, 2014), is caught in the crossfire between her father and the nameless assassin, long presumed dead, who’s targeted him for a client who, like everyone else in Neville’s remorseless world, just can’t let the past go.
Irish noir done to a turn, with just enough tearful sentiment to turn the screws tighter.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-641-29203-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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
No, it’s not for everyone—but if you want to read a supercharged meta-pastiche like this, this is exactly the one to read.
The 50th annual Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival, taking place aboard a long-distance train bound from Darwin to Adelaide, is punctuated by snarky dialogue, murder, and a zillion inventive misdirections.
“Why [am] I here?” wonders Ernest Cunningham, whose struggles to write his second book are interrupted by his invitation as a headliner at the festival-on-wheels, which will turn into the setting of his new book. Thriller writer S.F. Majors, former forensic pathologist Alan Royce, and artsy one-named Wolfgang are all much better known than he is. So is Lisa Fulton, even though she hasn’t published a novel in 20 years. And of course Henry McTavish, the bestselling creator of Detective Morbund, is in a different league altogether. After making a series of disingenuous promises about future developments—since he’s narrating the tale in the first person, for instance, he will definitely survive, and the killer’s name will be mentioned exactly 106 more times going forward—Ernest gets down to business with a combination of zeal and obliviousness. True to his word, he chronicles more than one murder, reveals a multitude of other felonies from burglary to rape, links the current mystery to a much older case, and sets the stage for a series of escalating reveals, one of them interrupted so many times that the self-anointed detective complains, “There’s not normally this much heckling in a denouement.” Stevenson rivals his golden age models in his willingness to sprinkle every scene with clever clues, outdoes them in setting up a dazzling series of false conclusions, and leaves them in the dust for modern-day fans with an appetite for self-reflexiveness.
No, it’s not for everyone—but if you want to read a supercharged meta-pastiche like this, this is exactly the one to read.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063279070
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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