A multilayered cast headlines this gleefully unorthodox and absorbing crime story.
Doctors at a Norwegian hospital may have ties to a mutilated body that washes ashore in Øybo’s mystery novel.
A 2019 holiday celebration, or Julebord, in Godshus, Norway, presages a shock: The morning after the party, some attendees go surfing and drag a body, missing most of its left leg, out of the ocean water. The deceased was a doctor at Godshus General Hospital, whose physicians had all gathered for the Julebord at a local restaurant. Is one of these medical professionals a killer? The book’s ensuing flashback chapters focus on six doctors, including the one who mysteriously died. Dr. Alessandro Gianetti is an Italian who chose medicine as his career in 1977 before joining the Godshus General staff in the 1980s. He and the others, like Somalian Dr. Faiza Abdi Noor, have led eventful lives both in and outside the hospital. One physician is aboard a flight that’s skyjacked, another is unexpectedly diagnosed with a chronic condition, and at least two engage in extramarital affairs. While spite or bitterness seems inevitable among people who work so closely and intensely together, the dead man indisputably garnered the most ire of all and gave others assorted reasons to mete out some form of revenge. Chief Inspector James Redding, who’s investigating the death, can’t help but notice the physicians’ guilty expressions following the startling discovery—they certainly have things in their past they wish to keep secret.
Øybo offers readers a choice of how they wish to read this novel, which is part of a proposed trilogy. Many chapters end with page indicators that allow readers to skip around the book and follow the story chronologically, or they can read straight through, from chapters focusing on each of the characters in their early lives to the evening of the Julebord. The lengthy narrative is chock-full of engaging morsels, especially when characters pop up in each other’s chapters. One person has a distinctive anatomical part that makes the character immediately recognizable, even when unnamed, and an intriguing recurring character has a connection to C.I. Redding. The cast displays a variety of personalities and backgrounds; Jewish doctor Hanna Rønneberg suffers the loss of loved ones, and Dr. Pia Andersen is a loathsome, blatant racist. Øybo, a doctor himself, fills the pages with jargon-laden descriptions of procedures, equipment, syndromes, and medicines. Footnotes help with some of these terms, as well as Norwegian foods, locations, and slang expressions that readers may be unfamiliar with. Because this narrative covers decades, it includes myriad nods to real-world history; these events weave their way into characters’ lives, as when Dr. Abdi Noor is separated from her father when boarding a U.S.-to-Norway flight mere days after 9/11. (“The girl is okay to board. But there’s no way we’ll give security clearance to the gentleman to get on this flight.”) For all its delightful melodrama, this story is truly a whodunit, since readers will have difficulty picking out the person (or people), if anyone, responsible for the dead body. Answers await readers in the illuminating final chapter.
A multilayered cast headlines this gleefully unorthodox and absorbing crime story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781771838337
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Guernica World Editions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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