His cool almost-ex Irene is as remote as ever; his violinist lover Joanna is off playing opera accompaniments; but Inspector Bill Slider still feels a bit as if it's old home week, because Sergeant Steve Mills, his old subordinate from Charing Cross, has just come aboard his latest case—the murder or music critic Roger Greatrex, whose throat was cut moments before he was to participate in a BBC panel. Apart from the scurrying of all the panelists and broadcast folk (none of them with any of his widow's reasons, or his mistresses', to do in the philandering Greatrex), who was wandering about in the corridor outside the men's room during those crucial last minutes? Sgt. Mills, that's who, insists a none-too-bright but stridently positive witness; and suddenly Slider, whose biggest worry so far was that his placid new super Eric Honeyman wouldn't give him the manpower he needed to nail down the case, now has to worry about the manpower he's got. A preliminary look into Mills's past leads only to another grisly murder—until Slider bethinks himself of a generic clichÇ that Harrod-Eagles (Grave Music, 1995, etc.) has audaciously dusted off. Briskly sketched characters on both sides of the law, tossed together in situations that crackle with gentlemanly tension- -though you may well wish the killer had had a more substantial tie to eminently killable Greatrex.
Pub Date: Dec. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80047-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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