The Santa Fe landscape and ethnicities are well handled, and the scanner denouement is a neat surprise. Though Barber isn’t...
Winner of the first annual Tony Hillerman Prize for best mystery debut set in the Southwest.
First Melissa Baca, a teacher at the Burroway Academy, is pitched off New Mexico’s Taos Gorge Bridge. Then elderly Patsy Burke, who heard two policemen discussing the death over her scanner and called the tip in to the Capital Tribune, is strangled in her home. Tribune editor Lucy Newroe, feeling bad about shirking her EMT volunteer work, piles more guilt on herself for paying only cursory attention to “Scanner Lady.” When she checks the newsroom scanners, there’s no record of cops talking. Detective Sergeant Gilbert Montoya of the Santa Fe Police, alerted to drug paraphernalia surrounding Melissa by Officer Manny Cordova, thinks there’s little chance the cases are related. But as Lucy pesters him, alibis disintegrate, and the Burroway principal turns out to be keeping some unsavory secrets of his own. Meanwhile, Melissa’s mom, blaming herself for one son’s death and mourning the murder of the daughter who replaced him, drives her other son, ignored and desperate for attention, to one of her bridge-playing foursome for solace. By the time Montoya and Lucy understand how that two-man conversation reached only one scanner, another Baca family member has died, a cop has hit the skids and Lucy has gone reluctantly on one more EMT call.
The Santa Fe landscape and ethnicities are well handled, and the scanner denouement is a neat surprise. Though Barber isn’t yet up to bearing the Hillerman mantle, her debut offers reason enough to anticipate a sequel.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-38554-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson—and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash—a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19597-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
Although the pace of this intricate tale is necessarily slow, the investigation and its ultimate destination are gripping.
An investigation into an 11-year-old murder unearths some surprising revelations in Inspector Ian Rutledge’s 21st case (The Gate Keeper, 2018, etc.).
Rutledge survived World War I shellshocked and living with the ghostly voice of Hamish, a comrade who died in his arms. When he helps a former soldier find his wife, the grateful man gives him a tip that might help Rutledge find one of the most wanted men in Britain, Alan Barrington, who was accused of murder over a decade earlier and hasn't been seen since. Rutledge's boss gives him the unwelcome job of following up the clue, which begins the inspector's unrelenting search for the truth. Barrington had been accused of engineering a motor crash that killed Blanche Thorne and gravely injured her second husband, Harold Fletcher-Munro. Barrington had been positive that Fletcher-Munro drove Barrington’s friend Mark Thorne to financial ruin and suicide so he could marry Blanche. Rutledge starts out by investigating Barrington’s friends, including his lawyer and estate agent, both of whom have known him for years. When each refuses to confirm or deny that he’s still alive, Rutledge begins to consider the possibility that Mark Thorne did not commit suicide but was murdered by one of the several men who wanted Blanche. Conversations with friends and relatives of the parties involved with Blanche reveal many conflicting opinions. Each snippet Rutledge gleans leads him deeper into a complex maze, but he never considers giving up even when his own wartime demons come to the fore.
Although the pace of this intricate tale is necessarily slow, the investigation and its ultimate destination are gripping.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267874-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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