Huddling in a cold, nameless town on the Suffolk coast, Tim Cornish recalls the time he got away with murder, not realizing that in Ruth Rendell's novels as Barbara Vine, nobody ever gets away with anything. Tim's victim is his sometime lover, paleontologist Ivo Steadman, the man who made Tim realize he wasn't undersexed but merely uninterested in women. Their whirlwind affair leads Ivo to invite Tim on an Alaskan cruise for which he'll be one of the resident experts. Besotted with Tim, Ivo makes a fateful mistake that maroons Tim in Juneau for a week without him, and Tim— beautiful, grasping, and utterly unscrupulous—takes that week to fall in love with mysterious Isabel Winwood. Panicking when he's squeezed between his two lovers, Tim confesses his earlier affair to Isabel but insists he's broken up with ``her''; aboard the ship with Ivo, he demands to be released from his commitment and reimbursed for his trip so that he can hunt Isabel down in Seattle. When Ivo threatens to get in touch with Isabel himself, Tim attacks him on a remote island and leaves him for dead as the ship steams away. Over a year passes before a series of cagey anonymous letters about famous maroonings in history makes Tim realize that somebody knows the secret he's kept so carefully. Much of this tangled web is laid out, in Vine's usual manner, from the beginning of Tim's narrative, but Vine saves her quota of surprises for the end. After the mind-boggling complexities of Anna's Book (1993), this is as relaxed, even tranquil, as Vine ever gets. If the plotting is a little thinner than usual, her seductive way with plausible, self-excusing Tim is a model of suave unmasking.
Pub Date: Jan. 19, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-79964-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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