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THE SWEET FRAGRANCE OF LIFE AND OTHER HORROR STORIES

A set of mesmerizing stories that wraps up way too soon.

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This remarkable debut collects a trio of horror tales starring Jewish characters.

Friedl Bamberger, in this book’s title story, lives a comfortable life in Germany before World War II. She revels in the wealth from her father’s successful department store and is perhaps a bit snooty. Her apartment building’s new porter, Henrik, catches her eye, and she’s ecstatic about the possibility of a new romance. However, Henrik’s arrival coincides with unforeseen changes as tenants start to disappear. “The Rebbe’s Prayer is Answered” follows a seemingly disenchanted rebbe in Poland whose loving wife can’t bear children. He pines for a merchant’s 15-year-old daughter and, since he’s unavailable for marriage, goes to disturbing lengths to get what he wants. In “The Jonah,” a new job in Palestine in 1941may allow 16-year-old Cili to escape poverty in Romania. On the voyage over, however, she shares space with a reputedly “anti-Semitic, brutish and resentful” crew. These men soon unleash a horrific assault that leads to a violent end for all involved. Schwartz, who offers all three stories in English and Yiddish, delivers enthralling character-driven tales that gradually darken as they go on. The main characters, for example, are all fascinating—even when don’t evoke any sympathy; Friedl is unabashedly self-centered (as when she plays piano in spite of the downstairs neighbor’s complaints), and the rebbe is loathsome. The author weaves in rich historical particulars, from the political climate of decades past to an account of a real-life incident that inspired one of the tales herein. Smooth, descriptive prose (“And there he is, his wavy hair catching glints of the afternoon sunlight, his powerful arms shoveling mulch in the garden”) makes these short stories fly by. Siewert’s black-and-white pen-and-ink illustrations (one per tale) boast simple but crisp details, including one particularly daunting and bloody image. This exceptional collection’s brevity is sure to leave readers wanting more.

A set of mesmerizing stories that wraps up way too soon.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 9789198721997

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Olniansky Tekst Farlag

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2023

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TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.

Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781464226229

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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