The fey main event couldn’t be more different from Gilbert’s tales of scalawag solicitor Arthur Crook. Retro fans rejoice.
Did your New Year’s Eve leave you feeling underwhelmed? Tuck into this reprint from 1933 whose centerpiece is a country-house party complete with everything from costumes to a corpse.
The pseudonymous Gilbert—real name Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973)—spins a web whose center, according to Edward Philpotts of the Home Office, is the Spider, a well-placed blackmailer he suspects is behind a recent rash of upper-class suicides. So he's eager to have solicitor Tony Keith root around in his relatives' home, Feltham Abbey, where Philpotts thinks Tony’s cousin Hilary Feltham is the latest blackmailing victim. That suits Tony, who’s received a frantic summons to Feltham by Lady Eleanor Nunn, the widow of Hilary’s father, Sir Percy Feltham, who topped himself over a family financial scandal back in 1917, leaving her to rescue her own fortunes by marrying Sir James Nunn. And it suits Tony’s old school friend Jeremy Freyne, who’s just learned that Hilary, the woman he loves, has become engaged to Arthur Dennis, of the Foreign Office. While Tony looks for signs of the Spider, Jeremy will tag along, elbow this interloper Dennis aside, and sweep Hilary off her feet once more. Other interested parties turn out to have plans of their own. Sir James and Lady Eleanor want to throw a party for Hilary’s 21st birthday, when she’s due to come into the 10,000 pounds her father salvaged from the general wreck of his estate. Sir Ralph Feltham, Hilary’s cousin, seems intent on blackmailing everyone he meets. Arthur Dennis rather winningly suggests killing Ralph. And when Ralph fails to turn up at Hilary’s party, it’s for the best reason in the world. The result is a country-house whodunit on steroids, with hyperextended expository paragraphs, gossip on tap 24/7, endless blather, and a meticulously detailed explanation at the end. As a bonus, readers can enjoy a pair of short stories from 1939 that show how much sharper the author’s voice became in the interval.
The fey main event couldn’t be more different from Gilbert’s tales of scalawag solicitor Arthur Crook. Retro fans rejoice.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1225-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
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 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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