Kuhns’ focus on a closed community allows her to keep her story from drowning in period detail while emphasizing both the...
The winner of the 2011 MWA/Minotaur First Crime Novel Competition takes an itinerant weaver searching for his son to an unexpectedly tangled mystery inside a Shaker community in 1796 Maine.
Returning to his home, Dugard Pond Farm, after a long absence, William Rees is dismayed to learn that 14-year-old David, the son Will’s sister Caroline and her husband Samuel Prentiss agreed to take in when Will left the farm in their care to ply his weaving trade on the road, has run away with nary a peep from them. Will swiftly tracks the boy to Zion, a Shaker enclave outside Durham, and even more quickly establishes that David considers himself abandoned by his father and has no desire to leave with him. But his brief visit with Zion leader Elder White means that he’s available to get detained on suspicion of murder by Sheriff Coulton when Sister Chastity, formerly Catherine Parker, is bashed to death, then invited at David’s suggestion to investigate her death after farm couple Henry and Jane Doucette vouch for his alibi. Everyone at Zion assumes that none of their Family could have broken the peace so wantonly, but Will’s not so sure. Chaperoned by Lydia Jane Farrell, who’s continued to live in Zion even after being expelled from the Family, he questions the Sisters and Brothers. He and his delightfully independent-minded Watson discover that Sister Chastity’s death is anything but simple; instead, it’s the latest instance of a pattern of violence that reaches back two years—a pattern that’s still not complete.
Kuhns’ focus on a closed community allows her to keep her story from drowning in period detail while emphasizing both the limitations and the charms of the Shakers’ vanished world.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00553-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Advertising executive Patterson doubles neither our pleasure nor our fun by giving us two intense, Hannibal Lecter-type murderers for the price of one in an improbable and hopelessly derivative mess of a thriller. Feds and local authorities on both coasts are baffled by a pair of serial killers targeting beautiful young women: The Gentleman Caller works the scene in sunny L.A., where he brutally murders and dismembers his prey; his counterpart back East, who calls himself Casanova, trolls the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area for sexy coeds to victimize. Their MOs provide plenty of fodder for an author trying to cook up a work of psychological terror: Both are powerful, handsome, brilliant (natch), commit perfect crimes, and, despite their busy schedules, manage to keep in touch with each other. To catch them, you obviously need a perfect crime fighter. Enter Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., detective/psychologist hero of bestselling Along Came A Spider (1993), who gets dragged into all this after his niece Naomi, a student at Duke University, vanishes. Working with the authorities and a medical student named Kate McTiernan, who was lucky enough to escape Casanova's clutches, Cross begins to understand how the two dueling psychos operate. Just in the nick of time, too, because the Gentleman Caller, on the run from the law out West, decides that nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina with his old buddy Casanova. So, what does Cross, whose favorite niece is now in the clutches of two sickos, do? Fall in love with Kate McTiernan, of course, in an ill-placed romantic subplot intended to raise the stakes in the deadly cat-and-mouse game. Does Cross save Naomi? Are the two killers brought to justice or, at the very least, consigned to gory demises? Who cares? As a storyteller, Patterson is a great ad copywriter.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-69370-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.
The real-life Victorian police detective who was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Mr. Bucket serves as the main character in a fast-paced historical mystery.
Although this is Mason’s debut novel for adults, he’s an accomplished playwright. Those skills are evident in the crisp dialogue and well-structured scenes of this book. It begins with a bang in 1860 as Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field, assigned to guard Queen Victoria and Prince Albert during a public appearance, witnesses an assassination attempt. The shooter, who’s arrested, is mentally ill, but Field quickly begins to suspect the man is just a tool of a conspiracy—one connected to the controversy over the new ideas of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Field’s determined pursuit of the truth is sometimes snagged by his celebrity; Dickens fans, including some in the royal family, insist on calling him “Mr. Bucket” and confusing the fictional policeman with the real one. Field persists, however, plunging into a dizzyingly complex plot that takes him all over London and off to Germany. The cast of characters teems with satisfyingly despicable villains, many of them based on real aristocrats and scientists. The most villainous, however, is the memorably terrifying Decimus Cobb, a former choirboy–turned–Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter. Countering Cobb and the other bad guys are the earnestly heroic Field, his resourceful wife, a kidnapped butcher’s boy, and Prince Albert, who gets a touchingly human portrayal. There are cameos by such famous figures as Karl Marx, Dickens, and, of course, Darwin. With many grisly murders and many shocking surprises along the way, the book rockets toward a last dark twist.
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-634-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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