A convoluted tale of love and murder set in a turbulent period when death and betrayal lurk around every corner.
Those who meddle in the affairs of kings live to regret it.
But sometimes they have little choice. Mistress Kate Clifford has already faced danger (A Twisted Vengeance, 2017, etc.) in Henry IV’s victory over his cousin Richard II, who's been imprisoned. She finds it difficult to refuse when Lady Margery Kirkby begs her to hide her in her guesthouse in York, if only for a night. Lady Margery’s husband, who’d been trying to broker a peaceful settlement between the cousins, was killed by a mob in Cirencester, and she barely escaped with her life. Kate’s overcome a difficult marriage and the deaths of most of her family to thrive financially in York, where she’s raising a niece and her late husband’s two bastard children. Her mother’s also living in York, where she keeps a house for women who are devoted but not pledged as nuns. But Kate's confidant and servant, Berend, has left without a word, and she’s not sure that she can trust Sir Elric, a knight who keeps watch over York for his lord, the Earl of Westmoreland. The king has ordered a search for Lady Margery. Kate’s still keeping secrets from Elric, who swears he’ll defend her and Berend, who has reappeared. Protected by her wolfhounds and her considerable skill with ax and knife, Kate travels the town, using her many sources to learn more, especially after a man is murdered and Berend is suspected. In a world filled with deceit, Kate must tread a cautious path as she seeks the killer in order to clear Berend, who plans to escort Lady Margery to safety. Although Kate and Elric have both been burned by Kate’s lack of trust, they still love each other, and she must depend on him and the men he commands to help her.
A convoluted tale of love and murder set in a turbulent period when death and betrayal lurk around every corner.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-862-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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