An ambitious but shapeless crime novel involving some of Russia’s strangest cultural artifacts.
In Burke’s latest novel, a music lover finds herself in the middle of a criminal conspiracy involving rare Soviet-era recordings.
The career of successful smooth jazz musician Jerry Zolotov is in decline. Instead of trying to update his sound or record new music, he’s turned his attention—and remaining wealth—to collecting some of the rarest jazz bootlegs: the so-called bone records, ingeniously and illegally printed in the Soviet Union using X-ray film. Jerry is particularly set on attaining the Holy Grail of these records, which has just come on the market; it was created using an X-ray of “the right arm, left wrist and all ten fingers that had been broken and belonged to a little girl whose father happened to be a tyrant named Joseph Stalin.” Not long after purchasing the record for the tidy sum of $2.7 million, Jerry begins to receive menacing black roses backstage at his shows. When Jerry drives out to play his saxophone in the middle of New York’s Verrazano Bridge late one night, he ends up taking a dive into the Narrows below. Meanwhile, MRI technician and amateur accordion player Becka Rifkin travels to Russia to reconnect with an old boyfriend from her childhood in Brooklyn. She’s also hoping to purchase a bone record while she’s in the country. She finds a seller and learns that word on the street is Jerry Z’s death wasn’t an accident, but a murder related to his possession of the Stalin record. Becka buys a bone record anyway—an apparently innocuous one with no famous backstory. But she soon finds herself in the midst of an international scheme of intrigue and murder far beyond anything she bargained for.
Burke’s prose is gritty and flecked with colorful details, as when Becka meets with bone record dealer Sofia, who lights a cigarette: “There was no air circulation, and the films definitely shouldn’t be exposed to smoke. Becka wouldn’t dare bring this up to Sofia, though, whose compact, muscular frame could probably rip Becka’s head from her neck and then stuff her inside one of the walls if her favor turned to rage.” There’s lots of imagination on display in these pages, and Burke paints an evocative portrait of the jazz musicians, aficionados, and mobsters of Brooklyn’s Eastern European community. The bone records themselves, which have roots in a real-life phenomenon, are fascinating, and Burke succeeds in bringing them to ominous, alluring life on the page. Unfortunately, the story takes a while to get going, and readers will not always be sure why they’re receiving particular pieces of information. Rather than scenes, Burke prefers long passages of exposition or quick dialogue exchanges. Chronologies become muddled, and needless flashbacks crowd out the present. The novel turns out to be a bit of a shaggy dog story, which makes for a particularly unsatisfying ending. Although there are many fine parts here, they never quite cohere into something greater than their sum. An ambitious but shapeless crime novel involving some of Russia’s strangest cultural artifacts.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781736221655
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Queen Esther Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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