Sigel’s control over the delicate material rescues the novel from melodrama.
A novel that revolves around every parent’s nightmare—a child who goes missing and months later turns up dead.
Dan Sandler is a fairly typical, though privileged, 14-year-old. He’s an only child of professional parents, his father a businessman involved in the construction of a new development and his mother a cellist for the New York Philharmonic. The family lives in The Hollow outside Smithfield, Mass., and their status as outsiders is important to the narrative. One Saturday Dan is home, and later that afternoon he’s missing. The anguished parents call on Sammons, the local police chief, to look into the case, but they are angered with his procedural regimen and suspect that he’s not overly competent—before now he’s never faced a crime of this magnitude. Sigel keeps us focused on the parents, Joshua and Nathalie, who endure two versions of hell: first not knowing the fate of their son, and then finding out his fate. They develop different and incompatible ways of coping with the mystery of their son’s disappearance. Nathalie withdraws, is unable to practice or perform and grows increasingly distant from her husband, while Joshua is obsessed and starts to become his own law-enforcement officer, stopping cars on the street near where his son disappeared and questioning passing motorists. As weeks become months, suspicion begins to surround several of Dan’s acquaintances, including Bobby Dawes, local stud and all-around bad boy; Sam Bonacio, a shy 15-year-old who’s been having violent arguments with his father; and the precocious Melanie, who alternately teased and tempted Dan. Joshua eventually finds out that his son had a secret life that involved meeting friends for pot-smoking and beer-drinking, and Nathalie’s understandable emotional distance drives her husband into the arms of Irina, a local waitress.
Sigel’s control over the delicate material rescues the novel from melodrama.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-57962-180-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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