Now that Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur’s wife has been murdered (Roses, Roses, 1998) and his affair with his boss Desmond Iles’s wife Sarah has slowed to the occasional bit of slap and tickle, it’s time for the younger generation to have their moment in the sun. Thirteen-year-old Mandy Walsh’s moment comes when she’s gunned down in a crossfire and the police discover she was a drug courier. Chief Constable Mark Lane, despondent over this latest illustration of the decline of the west, is determined, against the advice of hard-bitten Harpur and Iles, to infiltrate the gang that was using Mandy’s expert services. But the Chief doesn’t know that an infiltrator is already in place: a bent copper working as an informant for Lane’s opposite number, local druglord Mansel Shale. Nor does Lane know that Shale is in his own way as idealistically melancholy as the man who considers him the quintessence of evil. As the CID officers debate their best hope for stemming the rising tide of chaos, Shale and his sidekick Alfie Ivis, in a series of unwitting but alarmingly accurate parodies of Lane’s platitudes, natter earnestly about the need for an accommodation that will stem the rising tide of violence and restore the drug trade to the gentlemanly equilibrium Shale remembers with such nostalgia. Never before in Harpur and Iles’s previous ten cases has James so dazzlingly demonstrated the darkly comic interdependence of cops and crooks, or their central place in the mess of contemporary culture. For sheer nasty brilliance, this trenchant summary of his series is worthy to stand alongside Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04718-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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