A thoroughly enjoyable mystery that’s humorous and absorbing.
In Parker’s comedic crime drama set after World War I, a small-time detective must deliver a ransom to an aristocrat’s kidnappers, but then he too is kidnapped.
Rusty MacDuff, this delightful novel’s memorable protagonist, isn’t a great or famous private eye, but he’s willing to do what other, more respectable professionals won’t: “I specialised in the shameful, the embarrassing and the peculiar, with lucrative sidelines in the awkward and the disgusting.” He’s hired by the Duke and Duchess of Pirbright—not to find their 20-year-old daughter, Hattie, who was kidnapped from her own home three weeks ago, but to deliver her ransom: £150,000 in the form of gold bars. However, while MacDuff is waiting to make the drop at Wealdcombe Manor—the Pirbright’s home in Sussex, England—someone steals the gold out of what he thought was a secure room. MacDuff decides to keep this news to himself, so he can investigate the matter; he methodically composes a list of 14 suspects, which includes Hattie’s“fatheaded fiancé” George Fields. The case is strange, indeed; for instance, the police dismiss the abduction as a hoax, believing the scant evidence left behind to be manufactured. Then, a postboy, Eleazar Jones, is bludgeoned on the property, and Barleycorn, the butler, claims to have seen an “eyeless savage” nearby—a shirtless man, lathered in mud. Meanwhile, MacDuff must contend with rivals, including a genuinely great and renowned detective, Father Oremus, a Dominican cleric who calls himself the “Mysterious Monk” and believes “crime-fighting was the highest form of theology.” The deeper MacDuff investigates, the more he begins to suspect that there’s more to the case than meets the eye.
Parker artfully combines a recognizable iteration of detective noir with snappy British humor that calls to mind Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse. Parker’s work is an homage to literary works of the distant past, and, as such, isn’t brimming with originality. However, it remains an impressively perceptive novel in which sharp comedic banter frames a thoughtfully conceived darkness. The plot is complexly tangled, but never gratuitously so, and moments of suspense act as welcome invitations to think through the mess. MacDuff is remarkable in how unremarkable he is; he’s hapless but deeply intelligent, and unprofessional but surprisingly brave. He also possesses a kind of cheerful cynicism that makes him both entertaining and admirable: “Why stay in a place where life was cheap and law was weak? Because you knew where you stood. And could fight back. And if someone was nice and decent after all, well, you could only ever be pleasantly surprised.” World War I lurks in the background of the story—a conflict that MacDuff calls the “suicide of Western civilization”; it’s a catastrophe in which the detective participated years before, “spending the prime of [his] life in European ditches.” This paroxysm of global madness sets the tone for the whole work, which explores what people will do to be happy in a chaotic world.
A thoroughly enjoyable mystery that’s humorous and absorbing.Pub Date: June 8, 2020
ISBN: 9780857198754
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Mysterious Door
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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