In a change from her Cait Morgan series (The Corpse with the Platinum Hair, 2014, etc.), Ace introduces a pleasantly quirky...
A stately home provides the backdrop for a modern mystery.
The WISE Enquiries Agency is based in London, but the four partners represent the entire British Isles. Carol Hill is a pregnant Welsh computer expert who holds down the office. Annie Parker is a Londoner of Caribbean background. Mavis MacDonald, a Scot, is a retired nurse. The last member of the agency, the Honorable Christine Wilson-Smythe, is an Irishwoman. Though the agency is in financial trouble, a new case bids fair to change the partners’ lives forever. Henry Twyst, the 18th Duke of Chellingworth in Wales, thinks his mother, Althea, the dowager duchess, is losing her mind. There have been a few strange incidents, but the event that pushes the duke to call the ladies of WISE is Althea’s report of finding the dead body of a young man in the dining room of the Dower House, where she lives. When the duke investigates, all he finds is a bobble hat. The police don’t take it seriously, but it’s certainly enough for the agency to investigate. Carol stays home to do computer research. Christine, who knows the duke, goes to Chellingworth as a houseguest, and Mavis, to the Dower House, where she poses as an old friend of the duchess. Annie’s residence at a nearby pub whose publican hails from her area of London is abruptly terminated by her disappearance, presumably because she’s asked too many questions. After spending time with the duchess, Mavis is convinced that she’s quite sane. There really was a dead body; all they have to do is find it.
In a change from her Cait Morgan series (The Corpse with the Platinum Hair, 2014, etc.), Ace introduces a pleasantly quirky set of detectives who have their own diverse methods of crime-solving.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8495-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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