The latest reprint in the British Library Crime Classics is one of the earliest: a cycle of stories about a London detective first published in 1864, here introduced by Alexander McCall Smith, who ventures general remarks about female detectives, and Mike Ashley, who supplies some uncommonly informative historical background.
Even her closest friends think she’s a milliner, but Miss Gladden—not her real name, but “the name I assume most frequently while in my business” —can look back with pride on her secret career as a professional inquiry agent with a subtly shifting relationship to the Metropolitan Police. In “The Unknown Weapon,” her inquiries help the police discover who murdered young squire Graham Petleigh in his father’s manor house. In “The Judgment of Conscience,” she’s able to set the police straight about a lower-class romantic triangle that ends in tragedy. In “Tenant for Life,” her unofficial investigation, launched when she overhears a friend’s chance remark to her cabman husband about “Little Fourpenny Number Two way,” uncovers a plot to defraud the legal heir of a sizable estate. And her only role in the fact-based “A Child Found Dead: Murder Or No Murder” is to introduce a doctor friend who introduces his own childhood friend, Hardal, who does the sleuthing honors when a young boy taken from his bed is found dead nearby. “Georgy” ruefully recounts a blithe embezzler’s success in eluding both his conscience and any legal consequences of his theft. The most strikingly modern notes struck throughout all the stories, in fact, are Miss Gladden’s frequent failure to bring wrongdoers to justice and her regrets over the outcomes of her cases.
The creaking dialogue and halting, step-by-step-by-step deductions, which guarantee a glacial pace, will keep most of the curious at bay; this is no overlooked gem. But feminists and historical completists, the most likely readers to persevere, will find themselves amply rewarded by detective tales that more often focus on how and why than whodunit.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 9781464206474
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | HISTORICAL MYSTERY
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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