What’s one more casualty in war-torn Sarajevo? Big trouble for a homicide investigator struggling to keep his balance on the Bosnian tightrope in this darkly suspenseful first novel. Though life isn’t exactly good for Detective Inspector Vlado Petric, he’s accommodated himself to the rhythms of life in the combat zone, illegally packing his wife and infant daughter off to Berlin, rising each morning with the gravediggers outside his window, living from one pack of cigarettes and precious can of black-market coffee to the next. But all that changes when Esmir Vitas, chief of the Interior Ministry’s special police, is shot dead. His successor Juso Kasic, the acting chief who blithely admits he had every reason to kill Vitas himself, asks Vlado to head the investigation. Given homicide’s strained resources, that means virtually becoming the whole investigation. So Vlado, without gasoline or a working car, sets off on his legwork, picking his way among ruined streets and bombed-out buildings. Armed with a list of Vitas’s undercover contacts, he has no trouble unearthing Vitas’s crude attempts to muscle in on the illegal trade in tobacco and meat. But when none of these fiddles seems to justify Vitas’s murder (and this in a city that holds life cheap), Vlado presses on, and links Vitas to a complicated scheme to liberate works of art—to protect them till the end of the war, really, he’s told—that amounts to a wholesale sacking of Bosnia’s cultural treasures. Unfortunately, the closer to the truth about Vitas’s death Vlado comes, the closer he also comes to bothering a lot of important mobsters, generals, and, yes, Interior Ministers who very much don’t want to be bothered. Gorky Park in Sarajevo. Though Fesperman’s take on civil crime in a country at war won’t seem especially original to fans of Graham Greene or John le CarrÇ—or, for that matter, of Philip Kerr or J. Robert Janes—his portrait of shattered Bosnia can stand with their bleakest work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 9, 1999
ISBN: 1-56947-153-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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