In its best moments, a Canadian Anatomy of a Murder. A savvy, stylish, and very entertaining debut.
Canadian author Pyper's highly successful first novel (a huge bestseller Up North) is a teasing mystery that blossoms into a nailbiting courtroom drama, seasoned with a carefully measured soupçon of the supernatural.
The story begins with a beautiful bit of misdirection: a terse `prologue` that shows a teenaged boy and girl, who are cousins, `making out` in a canoe, which tips over, with disastrous results. The reader assumes (only half-correctly) that this incident is linked to the occurrence that brings burnt-out attorney Bartholomew Crane to the drab Ontario town of Murdoch, where two popular high-school girls have disappeared, and are presumed dead, at the hand of their English teacher (and secretive companion): `Barth's` sullen client Thomas Tripp. Crane's efforts to defend the uncommunicative Tripp (to whom circumstantial evidence points damningly) lead him to interviews with both missing girls' fathers (one a smiling blank, the other a vengeful religious zealot), the town's well-informed head librarian-newspaper editor, and a forthright old lady, Helen Arthurs, who fills Crane in on a weird local legend: the story of `Murdoch's Loch Ness Monster,` a distraught mental patient (and war refugee) who, having lost custody of her children, drowned in a nearby lake, and has since purportedly `returned,` to `take` other people's children, to replace her own lost ones. Inevitably, there's a mystery in the brooding Bartholomew Crane's past, which Pyper connects—smashingly—with the several mysteries of Murdoch, as the novel drives toward its (truly) surprising conclusion. Lost Girls borrows an important (though, to be fair, not crucial) plot detail from Peter Straub's Ghost Story, and its case is weakened by a single glaring improbability: the ease with which everyone here assumes the missing girls' deaths, though no bodies are in evidence (it seems more than just possible they might be runaways). No matter. Pyper quickly builds, and skillfully maintains a full head of increasingly suspenseful steam, and keeps the reader off balance, and hooked, throughout.
In its best moments, a Canadian Anatomy of a Murder. A savvy, stylish, and very entertaining debut.Pub Date: May 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33446-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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