It’s easy to see why Queen’s exercise in deduction has dated badly: Everything about it is creaky and artificial, from the...
Imperishable anthologist Otto Penzler kicks off his newest publishing venture, a reprint series of American Mystery Classics, with this 1934 brainteaser involving perhaps the strangest crime scene in all fiction.
When millionaire publisher/philatelist/gem collector Donald Kirk and his acquaintance Ellery Queen (The Adventure of the Murdered Moths, 2005, etc.) stop just before dinner at Kirk’s office, on the 22nd floor of New York’s Hotel Chancellor, they step inside to find everything in the waiting room—framed pictures, bookcases, furniture, rugs—turned backward and an unknown caller who’d told Kirk’s secretary, James Osborne, that he was here to see Mr. Kirk on a matter of great importance beaten to death and wearing all his clothes backward as well. Why would someone, presumably the killer, have taken the trouble to create such a baffling scene? That’s one of the greatest riddles in Golden Age detective fiction, and it’s a shame that nothing in between the opening sequence and the two concluding chapters that follow Queen’s signature Challenge to the Reader remotely measures up to it. Since the corpse remains unidentified and there’s precious little evidence beyond the bizarre state of the murder room, Queen, whom this early case finds at his most mannered (“I don’t feel in the donative mood this morning”), spends his time chatting up the forgettable suspects—Kirk’s cantankerous father; his sister, Marcella; his partner, Felix Berne; his friend Glenn Macgowan; and the two women in his life, perceptive Jo Temple and seductive Irene Llewes—and alternately unearthing and dismissing red herrings. Penzler’s introduction, which focuses on the cousins who created the Queen pseudonym, is brief but informative.
It’s easy to see why Queen’s exercise in deduction has dated badly: Everything about it is creaky and artificial, from the incredible logistics of the murder to the alleged passions of the characters. After all these years, though, the unbridled ingenuity of its central puzzle has never been surpassed.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61316-110-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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 suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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