Savill’s first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events. Fans of British author...
A literary debut that connects the Bosnian civil war with the Indian Ocean tsunami, two horrific disasters a decade apart.
Human rights researcher Anya Teal is trying to hunt down a man named Kemal Lekic 10 years after the 1990s war. She looks at the photo in the obituary that praises him as a war hero and thinks he's "handsome enough she had to remind herself of what he had done," deeds that early on the reader must guess at. He’d been a brigade commander from Stovnik in Bosnia, and he’d been presumed killed in a heavy shelling. No one could find his body, and he was “buried” in an empty casket in 1995. Kemal's best friend, Marko Novak, considers him to be “the hero who died…the only one whose life made any sense of the war.” But Anya follows plausible rumors that he survived and is living in Thailand in 2004. Conveniently, her old flame William Howell is an English teacher in Bangkok, and she hopes they can get together again. Anya has studied Bosnia and written a dissertation called “Rape as a Weapon of War,” and she wonders if Kemal was one of the rapists. Scenes move back and forth from postwar Bosnia to pre- and post-tsunami Thailand; just before the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and massive “concertina of energy” in the ocean, Anya says to William in Kao Lak: “I love that we can hear the sea.” Back in Bosnia, Marko thinks, “I’ve lost my childhood, have you seen it anywhere?” That sums up the sense of pointless loss that so many survivors of the Bosnian War must have felt. Little seems to happen in the story’s early stages, and the pace overall does not leave the reader breathless. And readers may wonder what a five-page chapter about skateboarding is doing just before the book’s end, but it’s entertaining nonetheless.
Savill’s first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events. Fans of British author William Boyd, take note.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-546-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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