FBI agent John Becker, a deadly force in his own right (Bone Deep, 1995, etc.), goes up against the Unabomber. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof, a frustrated chemist who vowed vengeance on New York City when affirmative action robbed him of tenure at City College. Now Jason Cole, calling himself Spring, is threatening to blow up every bridge and tunnel leading out of Manhattan unless he gets a $5 million payoff, and is establishing his bona fides by taking down the Roosevelt Island tramway. Cole's academic background, his Thoreauvian social nostalgia, and his old-fashioned mastery of his craft (Becker notes with admiration that each of his bombs is handmade) are all culled from headlines and manifestos; what Wiltse adds is a portrait of a donnish, painfully vulnerable wimp whose emotional development seems to have been arrested long before his first chemistry course—and a lively, incongruously lightweight plot to buffer the skirmishes between Supercop and Supervillain. Cole has no trouble attracting a slew of unlikely allies and sponsors, from Defone Lee, an enterprising homeboy who goes partners with him in his extortion demand, to Tony Buono, a hit man whom he hires to kill Lee, to Tony's cousin Donny (the Snake) Sabela, who steps in to assassinate Becker and turns out to have his own ideas about how Cole's operation could be run. Becker, already strung out between nursing his convalescent wife and FBI superior Karen Crist and fending off his subordinate Pegeen Haddad, who thinks their night of passion marks the beginning of their life together, snatches the investigation away from his groveling, incompetent boss and runs with it, but he's overshadowed this time by the bomber—a shame, since Cole, for all the nervous laughter his social gaffes provoke, is a lot less compelling, less interesting even, than the agent who dresses him down on the network news. But Becker and Cole and all the rest of them rolled together still can't compete with the real Unabomber, whose bizarre saga establishes a benchmark that far outclasses Wiltse's sturdy fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14208-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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