An artfully rendered amalgam of history and fictional inventiveness.
A murder mystery set in an ancient Israel distempered by political conflict.
Shemuel ben Yahayye, a scribe in his advanced years, has been found murdered, discovered by, among others, one of his students, Yehuda. The murder itself would not normally be considered unusual—he was found in an area known to be dangerous—but nomadic bandits would surely have taken his valuables. Both aggrieved and suspicious, Yehuda takes it upon himself to investigate Shemuel’s death, with assistance from his young bodyguard, Ioannis Vivis. Yehuda remembers a letter he recently received from Shemuel, only notable for the strange message it contained inside: “Learn what eye has not seen and what ear has not heard.” Shemuel also inserted the same message into an old manuscript he asked Yehuda to track down. Partly on the basis of a mystical vision, Yehuda comes to believe that Shemuel was cryptically pointing toward the existence of treasure buried beneath a temple, treasure that could be used to fund a revolution against Roman occupation of their lands. Also, the more Yehuda discovers, the more he comes to believe that Shemuel was much more than a religious personage or scholar; he may also have been a member of an underground rebellion intent on throwing off the yoke of political oppression. The author of many books, Chisti (The Sufi Book of Life, 2005, etc.) is a religious scholar whose erudition is evidenced on every page. He paints a vivid picture of a Jerusalem rife with political and cultural discord, struggling to maintain its historical identity under the boot of tyranny. The consequences of that internal conflict are deftly personified by half Roman, half Israelite Ioannis, who has also suffered greatly at the hands of the Romans, relegated to slavery as punishment for his father’s political allegiances. The mystery itself is gripping enough—unfurling slowly, tantalizingly—but the history provided as a backdrop to the fictional narrative is mesmerizingly real.
An artfully rendered amalgam of history and fictional inventiveness.Pub Date: June 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4818-7097-9
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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