Babylon comes to life; the characters mostly don’t.
In his second adventure, Egyptian cop Semerket makes a move on a Babylonian god.
Bel-Marduk is a famously curative deity sorely needed by a seriously ill Pharaoh. Ramses IV has given up on the local gods who, despite being worshipped with bountiful gifts and unstinting sacrifices, seem unable or unwilling to help. “Death,” Ramses tells Semerket, “gnaws at my vitals.” Why tap his Clerk of Investigations and Secrets for so critical a mission? Because Semerket is hot, having recently cracked the murder case (Year of the Hyena, 2005) that broke up a conspiracy and saved Ramses his throne and possibly his neck. The detective signs on, promising to return in good time, god in tow. Semerket, however, has his own agenda. His beloved wife Naia has disappeared in Babylon after being exiled for insufficient cause by the previous Pharaoh. True, rumors of her murder are persistent, but her yearning husband has never believed them. So off he goes, charged by Ramses as well as his own powerful longing to murky, quirky Babylon, a place where danger is ubiquitous and betrayal a constant threat. But brave, clever Semerket, a man who can get his black eyes to glitter on demand, is made for trouble and for multi-tasking.
Babylon comes to life; the characters mostly don’t.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5081-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.
V.I. Warshawski’s search for a homeless woman with a fraught past leads her deep into a series of political conspiracies that stretch over generations and continents.
Bernadine Fouchard, V.I.’s goddaughter, thinks that Lydia Zamir, whose songs about strong women she reveres, was shot dead along with her lover, Hector Palurdo, at a Kansas fundraiser four years ago. She’s only half right. The 17 victims ranch hand Arthur Morton shot in Horsethief Canyon include Palurdo but not Zamir, whom V.I. and Bernie happen to hear banging out haunting tunes on a toy piano under a Chicago railroad viaduct. But they glimpse her only momentarily before the traumatized musician flees and eventually disappears. Soon afterward, Bernie finds herself in trouble when the young man she’s been dating—Leo Prinz, a summer employee of SLICK, the South Lakefront Improvement Council—is murdered and she becomes a person of considerable interest to Sgt. Lenora Pizzello. The search for Lydia Zamir morphs into an investigation of her relationship with Palurdo, an activist against the Pinochet regime in Chile long before he was shot apparently at random. In the meantime, the disappearance of Simon Lensky, one of SLICK’s elected managers, throws a spotlight on the organization’s controversial proposal for a new landfill on the South Side. Everyone in the city seems to have strong opinions about the proposal, from Gifford Taggett, superintendent of the Chicago Park District, to Nobel Prize–winning economist Larry Nieland, to an inveterate protestor known only as Coop, who kicks off the story by vanishing after parking his dog with V.I., to her consternation and the ire of her neighbors and her own two dogs. As usual, Paretsky (Shell Game, 2018, etc.) is less interested in identifying whodunit than in uncovering a monstrous web of evil, and this web is one of her densest and most finely woven ever.
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243592-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.
A teenager with a troubled past becomes the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders, but ex–FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner, think there’s more to the story.
For the past three years, Pierce and Rainie have fostered Sharlah Nash, now 13, with the hope of soon adopting her. Sharlah’s childhood is the epitome of troubled: when she was 5, her drug-addict father killed her mother and then tried to kill her and her older brother, Telly, but Telly, then 9, bashed his head in with a baseball bat. The siblings were fostered apart, with Sharlah ending up with Pierce and Rainie, whose expertise as parents seems to come from their combined resumes as a former criminal profiler and cop, respectively. Telly, we learn in expansive flashbacks from the now-teenager’s point of view (Sharlah has her own, crowding an already packed narrative), bounced around before landing, age 17, with Frank and Sandra Duvall, a kind couple who are obviously not what they seem. In what appears to be an explosion of unexplained rage, Telly allegedly murders the Duvalls and then kills two people in a gas station before heading off into the Oregon woods, sparking a manhunt and fears that he’s coming after Sharlah. Pierce and Rainie (last seen in Say Goodbye, 2008) work with local law enforcement to build a psychological profile of the teen—which is questionable given the excessive amount of guesswork and second- and thirdhand information used—while trying to protect their daughter from harm.
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-95458-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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