A well-paced and well-plotted mystery-series entry.
Stander returns with his 11th novel featuring respected Michigan sheriff Ray Elkins, who investigates a beachside mystery while recovering from a recent trauma.
Ray, the sheriff of Cedar County, is back home after a lengthy hospital stay for a gunshot wound. Detective Sgt. Sue Lawrence has been keeping an eye on things in his absence, but he’s anxious to get back in the game, if only to distract himself from his memories of the altercation that caused his injury and the fact that his personal life is in flux. Fortunately for him, there’s plenty going on in Cedar County, especially on the massive private estate at Gull Point. Its owner, art-world bigwig Alice Ingersolle, is hosting a Memorial Day wedding for her daughter, just a few weeks after a severed human foot washes up on the property’s beach: “Small shoe,” as Sue calmly describes it. “Men’s size eight….Let’s get it into the cooler.” Meanwhile, unbeknown to anyone, the bride is carrying on an affair with Gull Point’s property manager,Scott Nelson,who, in turn, is sleeping with wedding planner Jennifer Bidwell;he also recently cooked Sue a romantic dinner of spaghetti carbonara. The bride receives a special gift from her grandfather, painter Gerhard Talmadge, before the wedding: a collection of priceless sketchesthat may have been stolen from Alice’s gallery during World War II. Then, on the day of the nuptials, a powerful storm hits Gull Point, which results in injuries to many of the guests. During the chaos, Gerhard is found dead in the woods. It’s a case that will provide Ray with a much-needed challenge.
Over the course of the novel, Stander employs prose that’s vivid and sharp, as when Jennifer realizes that a tornado has landed in the midst of the reception: “She could see that the people around her were screaming, too, but the sound of their voices was lost in the maelstrom. And then the protective canopy of canvas vaulted upward and away, flying through the air and crashing to the ground.” Equally impressive is the way in which the author unveils important bits of information by slipping, unexpectedly, into different characters’ third-person points of view. The book does take its time to get started, but there’s a reason for the slow accumulation of personalities and odd happenings, as it gives the author plenty of useful material for the murder investigation, once it begins. Ray and Sue, as character types, are fairly standard for the genre: a grizzled lawman and his younger female partner, each harboring an unspoken desire for the other. However, the author intriguingly delves into the psychologies of the various wedding attendees, whose messy lives and conniving ways add darkness and scandal to the plot. Fans of previous series entries will surely enjoy this installment’s classic, mansion-set storyline, but it will also satisfy newcomers to the Ray Elkins universe, as the tangled family history of the Ingersolles does put his and Sue’s skills to the test.
A well-paced and well-plotted mystery-series entry.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9975701-6-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Writers & Editors, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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