Grecian (The Harvest Man, 2015, etc.) spares no gruesome detail in this fifth installment about the hunt for England’s most...
Jack the Ripper meets his psychopathic equal in this macabre tale of late Victorian England.
Although Nevil Hammersmith, late of Scotland Yard, has the credentials to run his own detective agency, his only goal is to find Inspector Walter Day, his best friend and former colleague from the Yard. Day has been missing for almost a year, and his wife, Claire, is putting up the money for Hammersmith Discreet Enquiries, which, if not for employee Hatty Pitt, would be a one-case agency. She takes the initiative with the missing manager of the grandly refurbished and reopened Plumm’s Emporium, while her boss remains focused on Day. Despite all his searching, Hammersmith doesn’t know that practically under his nose, Day is wandering around in a dazed and amnesiac condition after months of captivity and mistreatment by a man he calls Jack. His jailer, who just released him, is better known as Jack the Ripper and has mesmerized Day into forgetting his wife and children and avoiding the police. Jack himself has eluded the members of a secret society that held him captive and tortured him in retribution for the pain he caused others. Now he’s killing the members one by one, and one of the few survivors, Claire’s father, hires a mysterious couple, known only as Mr. and Mrs. Parker, to kill Jack before he murders the entire society. Mrs. Parker is a particularly good choice for the job; her husband has to keep her in shackles at night so she won’t kill him just for the love of it. As pursuers and quarry converge on opulent Plumm’s, Jack is still one step ahead, with a secret weapon that only Walter Day can anticipate.
Grecian (The Harvest Man, 2015, etc.) spares no gruesome detail in this fifth installment about the hunt for England’s most famous serial killer. If you’re up for one more tale about him and you can stand the gore, you’re in for quite a ride.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17610-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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