Sherlock-ians, as is their wont, may quibble, but lovers of ratiocination (Sherlock Holmes and the Swedish Enigma, 2012,...
The world’s greatest detective confronts a Rupert Murdoch–like adversary.
Now thawed after years embedded in a Swiss glacier, Holmes is approached by Andrew Swann to investigate the biggest ongoing crime in Britain: the suppression of animal rights and the subversion of human democracy. Swann’s father, who retired after a career in Fleet Street, created the Rabbit Underground, an animal rights activist group whose legislative efforts have been squelched by media titan Gerald Gurloch. Gurloch’s fortune, which began with slaughterhouses and expanded to salacious tabloids, cybermalfeasance and political bribery, is now dedicated to three goals: Kill Sherlock Holmes, blow up Nelson’s Column and defame the queen. To achieve these ends, Gurloch buys up a Caribbean island from which to conduct nefarious enterprises. He hacks into Google and Scotland Yard’s files, putting pressure on Lestrade’s grandson, also a detective inspector, to resign. He corrupts Nigel Greenwood, current head of the Metropolitan Police. And he may just be underwriting professor Droon’s experiments on apes. Just what he has to do with the quiet deaths of Lord North and Sylvia Swann has yet to be proved. The quest to do so sends Holmes’ amanuensis, journalist James Wilson, scampering overseas and Holmes himself reconnoitering the Swiss Alps in his Aston Martin. Disguises come into play, as does a bit of code-breaking, the bickering of Gurloch’s twin daughters, Google-hacking under the nom de blog Black Swan and a master criminal’s gift of Dr. Watson’s little tin box of unpublished Holmes stories to Wilson. The denouement, which saves Lestrade’s job, defeats Gurloch and solves all the murders, finds Holmes facing his third deadly skirmish with death in peaceful Switzerland.
Sherlock-ians, as is their wont, may quibble, but lovers of ratiocination (Sherlock Holmes and the Swedish Enigma, 2012, etc.) will have a field day.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8218-9
Page Count: 183
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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