This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino (Malice, 2009, etc.), one of only a few translated into English, has...
A veteran police detective matches wits with a brilliant rookie criminal.
Meticulous high-school math teacher Ishigami frequents the modest box-lunch shop Benten-tei because of his crush on Yasuko Hanaoka, a young mother who works there. Yonazawa and his wife Sayoko, who manage the shop, speculate regularly about Ishigami's visits, but Yasuko seems oblivious to his attention. Although she and her daughter Misato are Ishigami's apartment building neighbors, they've never spoken outside of the shop. One evening, Yasuko's abusive ex-husband Togashi surprises her at home. A fight ensues, and when Misato intervenes to help her mother, Togashi is killed. As the panicked Yasuko considers her options, Ishigami knocks on her door and takes charge, from disposing of the body to crafting alibis for them. Enter veteran detective Kusanagi and his brisk junior partner Kishitani, who examine the body, dumped naked and wrapped in blue plastic in a factory district, its face bashed in. The inevitable discovery of the victim's identity leads to the pro forma questioning of both Yasuko and Ishigami. Kishitani is ready to dismiss them as suspects, but the veteran Kusanagi puts them on a mental back burner. Ishigami obsessively replays and adjusts his movements, using the murder to get close to Yasuko. When detective Manabu Yukawa, Ishigami's college rival, is added to the investigative team, it threatens to send him over the edge.
This character-driven mystery by the prolific Higashino (Malice, 2009, etc.), one of only a few translated into English, has much to recommend it, including a droll Columbo-like sleuth and a great surprise ending.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-37506-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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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