A model of the police/reporter partnership that’s especially effective in managing the counterpoint between its two leads.
A dementia patient dying of cancer in a nursing home holds the key to the third case for Copenhagen DS Erik Schäfer and Demokratisk Dagblad reporter Heloise Kaldan.
Heloise, who’s been visiting Jan Fischhof repeatedly for an article about a charitable group called Vigil, is spooked when, called to his bedside by a volunteer convinced that he’s at death’s door, she hears him mutter something about “Mads Orek” and his fear that he’ll be held accountable for his wrongdoings. Jan’s feeble attempts at backtracking the next time she sees him convinces Heloise that she needs to dive into the case of small-time criminal Tom Mázoreck, who drowned when his boat caught fire back in 1998. Confronted by Mogens Bøttner, a former colleague turned supervisor who forbids her to work the story further, she abruptly announces that she’s taking a week off. Schäfer meanwhile is challenged by superstar forensic scientist Jakob Sandahl, who blithely maintains that has-been jazz great Lester Wilkins’ bloody death was due to natural causes. So unlike virtually every other police officer in Denmark, he’s ready to work intermittently with Heloise, who links Mázoreck’s death to the vanishing a year or two earlier of Mia Sark, 19, and Nina Dalsfort, 17. Both disappearances are also connected to gang leader Jes Decker, whose pit bull met a condign fate soon after he attacked Mázoreck. Jes has mostly settled into a managerial role, but his son, René, makes no secret of his desire for Heloise to let sleeping dogs lie. As the investigation moves forward, there seems to be less and less room for surprises, but Hancock saves a whopper for the deceptively quiet climax.
A model of the police/reporter partnership that’s especially effective in managing the counterpoint between its two leads.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781639104895
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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