by Chris Kuzneski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2012
In Kuzneski’s latest (The Prophecy, 2010, etc.), series heroes Payne and Jones chase Mad King Ludwig’s mad money.
It’s a legendary stash, hidden away somewhere in one of his many castles. Ludwig II, a king who loved building castles, built them beautifully and, in fact, was planning a masterwork when person or persons unknown put an end to him and it. But that was the treasure’s reason for being, to finance a dream, the tall and turreted Ludwig legacy. Mid-19th-century Bavarians, however, taxed to the max and in effect captive patrons, had by now grown out of sympathy with their monarch’s artistry. Many among them were convinced he was crazy—evidence abounded—while others wondered if the treasure actually existed. Had Ludwig really spent the years amassing jeweled baubles and golden what-nots convertible into cash once his ducks were in a row? Or was it all a case of castle-building in the air? Enter Payne and Jones on cue. Jon Payne and David Jones are ex–Special Forces warriors who retired young and often wish they hadn’t. Classic adrenaline junkies, they miss the thrill of being shot at, and both readily cop to never having felt so alive as when, on one battlefield or another, death breathed down their necks. An old army buddy calls, informs them that another former colleague is in difficulties related to the Ludwig story. Can they rally round, drop everything, join in a quest? He has them at Mad King. Off to Bavaria they go, eager for anything that might involve a fire-fight. But Payne, Jones and company are not by any means the only treasure seekers tramping the Bavarian mountains. There are trigger-happy bad guys galore and a nice girl named Heidi with whom the boys can flirt when not filling body bags. Formulaic, but clearly Kuzneski’s audience is content to have it so. Still, some of that dialogue is gratingly corny.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15745-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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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