An exhilarating, page-turning blend of mystery, detection, romance, and people-versus-the-elements.
A wedding, a hurricane, and a murder combine in a breathtaking mélange.
Little do Nantucket police officer Meredith Folger and her fiance, Peter Mason (Death on Nantucket, 2017, etc.), know that their last-minute wedding plans are soon to go awry. Since cold, distant new police chief Bob Pocock cuts Merry no slack, she’s working until the last minute. Dionis Mather and her father, Jack, have a family business taking care of the denizens of Tuckernuck, a small private island off the grid, who are completely dependent on the Mathers’ boats to ferry them and all their supplies from nearby Nantucket. When a hurricane is forecast, Dionis and Jack mobilize to help the few still left on the island in September board up their houses and leave for Nantucket before the storm strikes. The only flies in the ointment are entitled NFL quarterback Todd Benson and his supermodel wife, who have nothing to do with the rest of the islanders, most of whose houses have been handed down through generations. Although the Bensons are not at their recently built mansion, they’ve left two horses and their stable girl, Mandy, without any plans for their safety. Mandy turns up as the Mathers are evacuating the last people, demanding a seat on the boat and refusing to stay with the horses. As the Category 3 storm approaches, Dionis sees and reports a distress rocket off Tuckernuck to the Coast Guard. Jack suffers a heart attack, and she promises him she’ll return and help those horses. The Coast Guard sends a chopper to a grounded yacht, where they find two people badly wounded. The woman dies on the way to the hospital, and the man’s head wound renders him unable to answer questions, giving Merry a possible murder to solve. Dionis ends up marooned on Tuckernuck at the height of the storm, caring for both horses and a man with a bullet wound. Can Merry work out the relations among all these doings before her wedding day?
An exhilarating, page-turning blend of mystery, detection, romance, and people-versus-the-elements.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61695-993-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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
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