A superb exposition of Ireland’s religious development and a touching look into McGarr’s heart. The death of Gill (The Death...
The last McGarr from Gill, who died this past summer, traces Ireland’s religious woes back to tussles between Christians and Druids, then moves forward to antagonism between Catholics and Protestants and the resentment of conservatives over the admission of so many students to Dublin’s Trinity College, whose library is the repository of the four-volume Book of Kells. When two of the illuminated manuscripts are stolen and a security guard killed, Peter McGarr, chief superintendent of the Garda Siochana’s Serious Crimes Unit, is upstaged by Chief Superintendent Jack Sheard, who gets himself appointed head of the investigation. Dodging Sheard and ubiquitous tabloid reporter Orla Bannon, McGarr and disgraced former Garda officers Ward and Bresnahan focus on Dr. Pape, Trinity’s head librarian, and his Oxycontin habit; Chazz Sweeney, stalwart of the archconservative sect Opus Dei; and a pair of father-and-son goons who may have taped the ransom demand of £50 million. Recent widower McGarr is attracted to rare-book archivist Kara Kennedy, but her past is shrouded in mystery—and, like Sheard, she may be setting up McGarr as scapegoat. Working through the raging religious controversies of warring sects, McGarr ignores his politically motivated dismissal from the case, zeroes in on the money trail, and survives a rocket launcher, a Glock or two, and greedy zealots to return the Book of Kells.
A superb exposition of Ireland’s religious development and a touching look into McGarr’s heart. The death of Gill (The Death of an Irish Sinner, 2001, etc.) deprives the mystery world of one of its most sensitive and talented practitioners.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-000849-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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