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
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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