Miller’s fifth entry continues her streak of successfully combining local color and detection.
Rachel Mast (Plain Missing, 2017, etc.) probes a murder in her parents’ Amish community.
Alma Studer never had much luck in life. Her first husband was a poor provider, and her second was sick for years. Even her Plain neighbors in Stone Mill, Pennsylvania, too unworldly to recognize the form of autism commonly called Asperger syndrome, can see that her older son, Moses, is somehow different. If her daughter, Mary Rose, hadn’t married Daniel Fisher, the Studer family would likely have lost their farm. But now Daniel is dead, killed in a hunting accident. The English police—state police who don’t always respect the ways of the Amish—insist that Daniel’s death is no accident. And when brusque Detective Sharpe questions the Studers, Moses suddenly confesses. Alma, convinced that her son hasn’t told the truth, enlists the help of Rachel Mast, who left the community years ago to seek more education than the Amish allow and returned to run a bed-and-breakfast not far from the place where she grew up. Rachel often runs interference between the Stone Mill community and the world outside. So even though she should be planning her wedding—only a few weeks away—to State Trooper Evan Parks, Rachel agrees to talk with Moses, assess whether his confession is genuine, and help him navigate the English justice system. She soon discovers that Daniel may not have been the upstanding family man his neighbors describe and that many both in and out of the Amish community have a motive for murder.
Miller’s fifth entry continues her streak of successfully combining local color and detection.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-0648-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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