by C.C. Benison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2013
A strong mystery reminiscent of P.D. James, with many well-developed characters, local color and a sensitive, intelligent...
A church fundraiser at a stately home goes horribly wrong.
The Rev. Tom Christmas, vicar of St. Nicholas Church, Thornford Regis, is understandably nervous about jumping out of a plane. But he’s pleased that the Leaping Lords are using their celebrity sky diving to help raise money to repair the church. Landing on the grounds of Eggescombe Park, he sprains an ankle, forcing him to stay over with his daughter, Miranda. The first indication of trouble comes while watching Hector, the tenth Earl of Fairhaven, and his wife’s brother, Oliver fforde-Beckett, seventh Marquess of Morborne, get into a midair wrestling match before both land safely. Oliver is a nasty customer whose relatives all dislike him, and Tom gets a bird’s eye view of his enmity not only with Hector, but also with his half sister Lucinda, his cousins Dominic and Jamie, Viscount Kirkbride, and his sleuthing wife, Jane. When Tom finds Oliver strangled in Eggescombe’s labyrinth, there is no shortage of suspects, all of them lying about their whereabouts on the night of the murder. Even Tom, who was being seduced by the stunning Lucinda, falls under suspicion, along with his former verger Jamie Kirkbride’s brother, a man with a secret who vanished after an earlier murder case (Twelve Drummers Drumming, 2011, etc.), emerges as a suspect. After the dowager countess’s artist in residence and lover is murdered, more motives emerge from Oliver’s past. Tom, helped by Jane, needs to figure out who is the guilty party.
A strong mystery reminiscent of P.D. James, with many well-developed characters, local color and a sensitive, intelligent investigator.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-34447-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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by C.C. Benison
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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