Published posthumously, this 11th installment in the elegant Fielding series (The Price of Murder, 2003, etc.) was completed...
The inexplicable suicide of a powerful British lord leads Sir John Fielding and Jeremy Proctor to the weird worlds of medical quackery and necromancy.
In 18th-century London, the Lord Chief Justice appeals to jurist and sometime sleuth Sir John Fielding when several witness see the distinguished Lord Lammermoor jump to his death from Westminster Bridge—even though he had no apparent reason to kill himself. Giving Sir John an edge is the secret disclosure of Annie Oakum, a former cook in the Fielding household gone on to thespian fame at the Drury Lane Theatre with David Garrick’s famous troupe. She confesses to wide-eyed Jeremy, the blind Sir John’s eyes, legs, and amanuensis, that she spent the night with Lammermoor, her lover, before his fatal leap. A dispute between the coroner, grim Mr. Trezavant, and the earnest doctor who first examined the body leads to an unsatisfying judgment of suicide, and further probing by Jeremy for Sir John. Sir John is suspicious of secretive Lady Lammermoor, who’s tight with Mr. Goldsworthy, a “progressive” physician who claims he can heal with magnets and magnetized water. Unfortunately, the investigation’s timing couldn’t be worse for Jeremy, whose marriage to his long-time love Clarissa, Lady Fielding’s ward, is imminent.
Published posthumously, this 11th installment in the elegant Fielding series (The Price of Murder, 2003, etc.) was completed by the author’s widow and mystery writer Jack Shannon. Most readers will wish for more.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15242-3
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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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