Bretherick, a lecturer in criminology, brings earnest zeal, if not graceful prose or skillful pacing, to her debut novel....
A series of fictional murders in 19th-century Italy tests the theories of a real-life criminologist.
James Murray, a student of the renowned Dr. Joseph Bell in Edinburgh, has come to Turin to learn everything professor Cesare Lombroso can teach him about the new science of criminal anthropology. When the murdered and mutilated body of one of Lombroso’s experimental subjects is found propped up against the monument to the dead in Piazza Statuto, with a note in blood reading “A Tribute to Lombroso,” James wonders why his new mentor is content to leave the matter to two investigating branches of the police instead of using his expertise to find the killer. Instead, Lombroso seems focused on a symposium that brings together some of the greatest scientific minds in the world—some of whom appear to be intent on deflating the supremely self-confident Lombroso. A second murder with another mutilated body makes James wonder whether the murderer is using the corpses’ body parts to symbolize elements of Lombroso’s best-known textbook. But that theory doesn’t explain why the killer carved upside-down crosses on the victims’ shoulders or why there are two different styles of handwriting in the taunting notes to Lombroso or why James keeps feeling that someone is following him. As murder follows murder, not only Lombroso but the woman James has come to love are threatened, and James is forced to ask uncomfortable questions about his own dark past and possibly darker future in a tale that tries but fails to maintain suspense.
Bretherick, a lecturer in criminology, brings earnest zeal, if not graceful prose or skillful pacing, to her debut novel. Although her erudition can make for heavy going, the personal issues of her fictional hero offer some relief from the pedantry of the historical Lombroso and his colleagues.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-577-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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