Quirky and satisfying.
A distinctive Swedish duo returns (Dark Music, 2022) in this missing person yarn.
Almost 14 years ago, Claire Lidman left her home and husband with neither notice nor note. She apparently perished in a fiery crash; her charred corpse was identified through dental records. Nearly everyone believes that she is dead, but her husband clings to hope. A recent photo—a holiday snap taken by a neighbor—surfaces with what looks like Claire’s face in the background. Enter professor Hans Rekke and police constable Micaela Vargas to investigate. “I may be a detective of sorts,” Rekke says, “but I am not a policeman or a lawyer.” He sees himself as “a pianist and Professor of Psychology, a fragile intellectual” who sprinkles his sentences with Latin phrases. But he underrates himself. For one thing, he has powers of deduction rivaling those of Sherlock Holmes: he hears footsteps coming from an elevator and he knows it’s Micaela, “with her punctuated eighth tempo,” and he concludes she’s with his brother, Magnus. Claire once had business ties with Gabor Morovia, whom Rekke has known since his youth and who now is a powerful, vengeful “lapsed mathematician and womaniser,” not to mention a rotter who also likes to torture and burn cats. Readers will enjoy hating this villain, who would have fit perfectly in a James Bond movie. He’s a demon on the chessboard, which plays a key role in the outcome. And readers will like the good guys, who have their own baggage to tote. Rekke is a pill popper who enjoys his “hardly addictive” OxyContin. Down-to-earth Vargas is a good cop who hates crime, especially when it’s committed by her career criminal brother. (One of his pals warns, “Stop digging dirt on your brother, you piece of cop shit.”) Tension builds to a crescendo in this well-crafted novel with an ending that suggests a third volume to come.
Quirky and satisfying.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593319239
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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