As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell...
Goldberg rises above the sleazy glamour of his well-received debut (Fake Liar Cheat, 2000) and takes a far deeper cut into his material.
In Los Angeles, anthropologist Paul Luden gets a call from Bruce Duper, his neighbor on Granite Lake in upcoast Washington. Paul’s separated wife Molly has disappeared from their lonesome cabin. Their boat is docked, the cabin’s front door locked. Where’s Molly? Now in his mid-30s, Paul drives up with his new love, Ginny, 19, his navel-ringed student, whose insecure, demanding dialogue Goldberg captures dead-on. We hear about Paul’s parents and his pathetic losses with Molly. Paul and Molly, it seems, should never have married, both being manic-depressive (details about their illness are doled out slowly), but at least Molly’s body knows more than they do: it aborts one fetus, has another rupture her fallopian tube, and finally creates a monster with the one child she does bear, Katrina, a beautiful little dying girl with brain and body tumors which in themselves harbor. . . . Since childhood, Paul’s illness has had him drawing inner organs and bones of pigs and other animals—now he’s a bone-smart anthropologist. A large part of the story’s charms are Paul’s very, very big thoughts about the descent of man from a single cell—the mind of an anthropologist viewing his family’s wink of existence. When Katrina dies, Paul madly draws her inner organs, tumors (and what’s inside them), while under the delusion that he can plant her cells in the earth or lake and have them regrow. But now where’s Molly gone? His dead smolder inside him, flare up and sear—and is Molly or Katrina the title character?
As in the film A Beautiful Mind, our deepening awareness of the hero’s madness is the main plot. But Paul is not Russell Crowe, and our ties with him weaken the more we learn. Still, strong stuff as the world wavers.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56947-284-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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