A generally engaging labor of love with details that truly immerse readers in its characters’ work.
In Rowan's short novel, a young logger recalls a past murder and a search for answers.
Ed “Knucklehead” Knockle is an angry young man and a fighter who decides, in 1975, to take a job at the logging outfit where his father died in a mysterious accident, before Ed was born. (The book consists of Ed’s recording of these happenings a quarter-century later while on a trip back to the Olympic Peninsula.) His first day on the job, Ed becomes bunkmates with Bob Smith, another newbie, a huge, taciturn Iowan. Readers meet other characters, such as Crank, the boss, and, later, a scary hooktender named Spike Larue. Readers also get a glimpse of a daily grind that would break most men. Ed and Bob survive their first week, though, and become true loggers and fast friends. Then comes new secretary Ruby Faulk; she and Ed become friends, and she and Bob become lovers; later, she breaks it off with Bob, who’s devastated. After a Thanksgiving break, the men come back to camp, where Ruby’s found stabbed to death, and Spike’s knife, which he often flaunted, is found beside her body. A dramatic and scary climax leads to a resolution of the mysteries surrounding Ruby as well as Ed’s father. Rowan was himself a logger on the peninsula for almost a decade, so he clearly knows the life in his bones. He immerses readers in the logger vocabulary (tailhold, choker, skyline, crummy, yarder, gut-hammer), and each chapter begins with an uncredited pen-and-ink sketch showing a scene from the logging life. It’s effectively revealed to be a hard, dangerous, dirty, and ill-paid existence, but it’s also one in which these skilled men take pride, as it’s evident that most guys would not last a day in their shoes. Overall, the plot is largely believable except for a final twist that many readers may find gratuitous.
A generally engaging labor of love with details that truly immerse readers in its characters’ work.Pub Date: June 18, 2020
ISBN: 9781087905099
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Cirque Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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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