An effectively moody murder mystery—and more—set in 21st- century Russia, from the versatile James (The House of Janus, 1990, etc.). It's 2015, and nationalist forces have just bested insurgent anarchists in a three-year struggle for control of a corrupt, enervated Russia. Shortly after the guns fall silent, out-of-favor police inspector Constantine Vadim is dispatched from remote Murmansk to battle-scarred Moscow. Although without experience in homicide, he's detailed to investigate a succession of bloody murders in which a serial killer dubbed ``monstrum'' kills and mutilates young women. At the behest of the Cheka (KGB redux), the broody detective (still melancholic five years after his divorce from Julia Petrovna, a charismatic commander of rebel troops during the uprising) also works as a double for Russia's authoritarian vice president, Leonid Koba. While Costya pursues his inquiries amidst the turmoil of an anything-goes capital city and a ramshackle government, he's contacted by Julia, on the run from the belligerency's vengeful victors. Eventually, the dogged detective, with the help of district coroner Dr. Natalya Karlova, is able to establish a link between the murders and an illicit traffic in transplantable body organs. He also stumbles on an even greater crime, a cynical plot to rehabilitate Julia (whose lust for power transcends mere ideology) as Minister of Reconciliation. Stripped of all illusions, a desperate Costya takes matters into his own hands in hopes of subjecting the guilty to appropriate punishments and (paradoxically, perhaps) putting his beloved homeland back on the road to a government of laws, not men. At the close, he's back in Murmansk, making a new life for himself, salt-of-the-earth Natalya, and their unborn child. A bleak but engrossing tale whose impact owes much to the author's skill at conveying the horrific details of a future-shock domain that's neither East nor West but sui generis. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-45770-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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