Rich as history and philosophy, largely weak as drama.
Set in squalid 17th-century London, this intellectually rigorous and emotionally cool mystery finds Sir Isaac Newton pursuing counterfeiters and uncovering a far-reaching plot that threatens Great Britain.
A writer whose works move across time and take many forms, Kerr (The Shot, 2000, etc.) here sets a case against the background of England’s war with France in the late 1600s. With the outcome of the conflict uncertain, England can ill afford a collapsed economy, a distinct possibility if counterfeiters abroad in the land remain unchecked. To deal with the problem, Parliament and the King of England appoint Newton to ferret out “coiners” from the Royal Mint, located in the Tower of London. Joining Newton is Christopher Ellis, whose recollections of the case, coming over 30 years later, form the narrative. (Like Newton and others here, Ellis is based on a real-life figure.) Before long, Ellis’s predecessor at the Mint is found murdered, and three more killings follow, all in gruesome circumstances and with ciphers left at the scene. “ ‘I am a man that sees much and understands more,’ ” proclaims Newton as the investigation gets underway. Indeed, his keen observations and deductions become the core of his dialogues with Ellis, their subjects spiraling from the case to include science, religion, and human nature. In the latter regard, Ellis benefits as well from a brief affair with Newton’s niece in a welcome subplot that warms what is largely a cerebral pursuit: the characters here, excepting Ellis but including Newton, seldom become more than givens in an intricate syllogism. The subtitle, The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton, is indeed curious, as Newton spends most of his time alone pondering the ciphers. From these clues, he perceives that the murders are all linked to a covert plan that may topple the nation just as it finally triumphs in war.
Rich as history and philosophy, largely weak as drama.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-60981-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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