A sequel seems inevitable.
Harrison (Murder at the Queen’s Old Castle, 2019, etc.) trots out a Victorian A-Team to investigate the death of a London housemaid no better than she should be.
All is not well at No. 5, Adelphi Terrace. The building’s residents, barrister Jeremiah Doyle, Yorkshire schoolmaster Frederick Cartwright, and rising journalists Jim Carstone and Benjamin Allen, are in a tizzy because saucy maid Isabella Gordon went missing shortly after hinting to her friend and fellow maid Sesina that she knew a secret a certain someone would pay handsomely to keep hidden. All too soon, Isabella’s corpse is fished from the river, and Inspector Field, the real-life inspiration for Inspector Bucket in Bleak House, is called to investigate. Since Field’s friend Charles Dickens still remembers Isabella as a notably noncompliant tenant of Urania Cottage, a home for unfortunate young women largely underwritten by Dickens, the celebrated novelist promptly interjects himself and his friend/colleague/amanuensis Wilkie Collins into the case. The pair, guided largely by Dickens’ ebullient certainty that “I’m always right when I put my mind to a matter,” decide for highly plausible reasons to focus their suspicions on Cartwright and for much more obscure reasons to fasten on Isabella’s early, pre-blackmail, pre-Urania years for clues to her killing. Despite a plot twist borrowed from one of Agatha Christie’s last novels, the results are never exactly surprising, but the Victorian atmosphere, filtered alternately through Sesina and Collins, is thick enough to cut with a knife. The real triumph is Harrison’s Dickens: sublimely conceited, short-tempered, self-dramatizing, often bombastic, and perfectly matched with the infinitely less self-assured Collins.
A sequel seems inevitable.Pub Date: July 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8876-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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