Earnest and inept, although at least it lacks the heroic scale of such recent outings as Two Dollar Bill (2005).
Stone Barrington takes a break from recent rounds of overscaled intrigue for an old-fashioned whodunit, his first since L.A. Dead (2000).
Although the jet-setting attorney has seen his cousin Richard Stone only once in the past 20 years, this is clearly the week for news of Dick. First, Stone receives a package containing Dick’s new will and a $1,000 retainer as executor of same; the following day, he learns that Dick is dead, shot along with his wife and teenaged daughter in an apparent murder-suicide. Even though the little Maine island where the Stones had been summering was so hard for strangers to reach that the locals think Dick must have killed his own family before turning the gun on himself, Stone’s not convinced. After all, Dick had reason to be happy (he’d just nailed a promotion to Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA) and just as much reason to be wary (he’s disinherited his older brother, and a foreign spy calls too late to warn him of grave danger). Flying his divorcing ex-partner, NYPD Lt. Dino Bacchetti, and his sometime lover, federal agent Holly Barker, up to Islesboro, Stone soon vindicates his late cousin—but not soon enough to prevent a rash of new homicides. The island is so dangerous, in fact, that in no time Holly’s been replaced in Stone’s smiling bed by Arrington Calder, the mother of his six-year-old son, who makes the trip from Virginia after Stone intimates that violent death has turned the island into an open house. In the hands of a lesser writer, some of these plot strands would eventually lead somewhere. Here, they tail off into more murder and a single kidnapping. Bet you can’t guess who’s kidnapped.
Earnest and inept, although at least it lacks the heroic scale of such recent outings as Two Dollar Bill (2005).Pub Date: April 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-399-15342-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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