Cholera and worse strike New Orleans in 1833 in this hectic, dankly atmospheric sequel to A Free Man of Color (1997). Benjamin January, the freed slave who practiced surgery for six years in Paris but makes his living back home as a piano player, is already exhausted from tending the sick in Charity Hospital and arguing with the self-regarding white medicos about the efficacy of bleeding the tormented victims of “Bronze Jack” when he’s accosted by Cora Chouteau, a manumitted servant who begs him to help her reunite with her new husband Gervase, the houseman who’s disappeared into the house of his new masters, Delphine and Dr. Nicolas Lalaurie. Before January can tell Cora that he’s arranged a meeting with Gervase, she’s disappeared too—pursued by a story that she poisoned her own master and mistress. Emily Redfern recovers sufficiently to accuse Cora of stealing $5,000 and a string of pearls; alleged rapist Otis Redfern is beyond recovery. The town’s feelings, easy prey for any rumor that will deflect the citizens from the epidemic that everybody recognizes but the newspapers never mention, swiftly turn against Cora. But January has hardly a moment to spare for her when he’s called to Rose Vitrac’s ravaged little school, and from there to the side of his ailing, pregnant sister. Two patterns emerge from Hambly’s darkly vivid swirl of subplots: Friends of January’s family, especially dark-skinned freedmen, are disappearing, perhaps claimed by Bronze Jack, perhaps victims of a more human predator; and the gap between what the citizens know and what they admit, between the secrets they’re privy to and the blame they’re eager to cast—old Creole families to parvenus, landowners and slaves alike to freedmen—widens alarmingly. The shortcomings of Hambly’s mystery plot—the culprits are too obvious and too many—strengthen her sense of a grim, miasmal conspiracy between human monsters and nature gone mad.
Pub Date: July 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-10254-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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