Brilliant, irresistible and incorrigible, Flavia has a long future ahead of her. Bradley’s mystery debut is a standout chock...
A precocious 11-year-old chemist confesses to murder.
Buckshaw, the de Luce ancestral home, is in a bit of an uproar. First the cook finds a dead snipe with a stamp jammed on its beak on the doorstep. Then young Flavia awakens in the dead of night to hear her taciturn father, who normally saves his passion for his stamp collection, arguing with someone. Creeping out to the cucumber patch below her window to see more, she finds a man who breathes out the word “Vale,” then expires. When Inspector Hewitt arrests her father, Flavia decides that her confession will save him. Hewitt doesn’t believe her, of course, and she is forced to solve the crime between making trips to her attic sanctum, poisoning her sister Ophelia’s lipstick and ignoring her sister Daphne, who always has her nose in a book. The one person she trusts is the family factotum, Dogger the gardener, a shell-shocked war comrade of her father the Colonel. Her snooping leads her to an ancient episode involving her father, the corpse and another former alumnus of Greyminster who has few qualms about killing her.
Brilliant, irresistible and incorrigible, Flavia has a long future ahead of her. Bradley’s mystery debut is a standout chock full of the intellectual asides so beloved by Jonathan Gash readers. It might even send budding sleuths to chemistry classes.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-34230-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to...
Rookie Twelve Sleep County Game Warden Joe Pickett’s not much of a shot, and he’s been looking like a goat ever since poacher Ote Keeley got the drop on him with his own gun during a routine arrest. But at least he’s doing better than Ote, who’s turned up dead on the woodpile outside Joe’s house. Joe’s search in Crazy Woman Creek canyon for the two outfitters and guides Ote was most recently partnered with ends happily, though violently, and suddenly Joe is the man of the hour. Longtime County Sheriff Bud Barnum nervously asks Joe’s assurance that he’s not going to support neighboring game warden Wacey Hedeman’s challenge in the upcoming election; trophy wife Aimee Kensinger, who really likes men in uniforms, invites Joe’s family to housesit her palatial digs for three weeks; and wily Vern Dunnegan, Joe’s predecessor, wants Joe to join him in pulling down big bucks from InterWest resources, the fat-cat corporation for whose gas pipeline Vern’s lining up local support. All this good news is only a front, of course, for a monstrous assault on Joe’s livelihood, his integrity, and his family—and incidentally on an inoffensive species long assumed extinct. In response, Joe promises one of the bad guys that “things are going to get real western,” and that’s exactly what happens in the satisfyingly action-filled climax.
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to imagine tourism-marketing exec Box topping his debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14748-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Both darker and more absurd than previous romps, the latest Montalbano is a bracing cautionary tale.
Murder, meltdowns, and a boisterous Swedish film crew bring chaos to a veteran police chief and his Sicilian community.
Inspector Montalbano has his hands full when a television crew from Sweden invades his bailiwick. To celebrate the linking of Vigàta with its sister city, Kalmar, Swedish TV is filming a movie about a romance between a Swedish girl and a “youth from Vigàta.” All this bustle is a nuisance to the world-weary Montalbano (The Other End of the Line, 2019, etc.), who coincidentally finds himself investigating an odd case that involves the cinema. Ernesto Sabatello has discovered a reel of film from decades ago: a collection of shots taken by his father, Francesco, once a year over a series of years. The boring film shows just a patch of wall, apparently unchanged year after year. Montalbano is intrigued, but it takes him quite a while to focus on this puzzle when distractions come in the form of a melee between Swedes and Sicilians and the need to referee the marital battle between his quirky detective, Mimì, and Mimì’s wife, Beba. This last becomes unexpectedly serious when Mimì attempts suicide. The discovery that Francesco had a twin brother named Emanuele, who apparently committed suicide in 1957, makes the case even curiouser. Montalbano’s attentiveness to Swedish visitor Ingrid and her blond bear sidekick, the director Gustav, puts a new wrinkle in his relationship with girlfriend Livia. Then another investigation concerning an incident at a school is added to his crowded plate. When disaffected teens emerge as the prime suspects, Montalbano fears for the state of the world.
Both darker and more absurd than previous romps, the latest Montalbano is a bracing cautionary tale.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313-496-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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