Claire Montrose is slowly withering on the vine of the Oregon Motor Vehicle Division’s Custom Plate Department when her reclusive great-aunt Cady, whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years, dies and leaves her entire estate to Claire. The estate’s not much—mostly a cabin-sized pile of souvenirs from Cady’s days in the WAC in war-torn Germany—but one painting of a young woman takes Claire’s eye. And so, over the arched eyebrows of her risk-aversive beau Evan Elliott (whose every cell seems perfectly attuned to his job as an insurance adjuster), she decides to wangle a week off from the task of separating allowable vanity-plate requests (“RESQ ME”) from the other kind (“6ULDV8”), overcome her own fears of never having been farther east than the Idaho border, and take her prize to get appraised in the Big Apple. En route to Christie’s and Sotheby’s, she stops in instead at the more modest Avery’s auction house and runs into appraiser Troy Nowell, whose behavior is so questionable—he assures her the painting is a forged Vermeer, then invites her to dinner at a posh restaurant—that even this country mouse becomes suspicious, as she does of Dante Bonner, the painter who sweet-talks her as she’s eying real Vermeers at the Metropolitan Museum. Even back in Portland, where she’s flown only a step ahead of the thief who’s ransacked her hotel room, every male in the cast is acting like a potential art thief, setting up a finale that reads like a corn-fed version of Audrey Hepburn’s Charade. Henry’s first is a soothing dose for readers as ingenuous as her heroine. Even the ubiquitous license-plate puns (“H2OUUP2,” “FX108”) are translated in a kindly appendix.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-019204-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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