Archeological treasures, a reenactment of a classical Greek tragedy and Balkan politics vie rather unevenly for prominence...
Marital and political discord in 1928 Athens.
Plucky Laetitia Talbot (Bright Hair About the Bone, 2008, etc.) and formidable Lady Maud Merriman are sitting together in an Athenian amphitheatre watching a dress rehearsal of Agamemnon directed by Lady Maud’s husband and Letty’s ex-lover, scholarly archeologist Sir Andrew. The rehearsal is ruined when Sir Andrew winds up in the bathtub instead of the cloth dummy meant to receive Agamemnon’s fatal wound to the heart. Whodunit falls to Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Percy Montacute, now seconded to Athens, and local security chief General Konstantinou. Percy immediately decides that Letty’s perfectly suited to be his second-in-command, and she obliges, somewhat to the chagrin of her lover, cleric William Gunning. Maud’s cousin Thetis, who played Clytemnestra and also happens to be another one of Sir Andrew’s lovers, is jailed on murder charges, then released in time to argue with the new widow before Maud takes a fatal header from a second-floor balcony. Letty, named prominently in Sir Andrew’s will, becomes a suspect. She’s shot at, then abducted, then forced to bargain for her life with a Macedonian bent on a vengeance to be taken at the rescheduled opening performance of Agamemnon to be attended by Prime Minister Venizelos and his wife. There’ll be more death along with a smattering of romance between Thetis and Percy before the final curtain rings down.
Archeological treasures, a reenactment of a classical Greek tragedy and Balkan politics vie rather unevenly for prominence in this heavy-handed third outing for Letty.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-33991-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mortalis/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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