A clever, engaging spin on Victorian-era crime stories.
Sherlock Holmes’ mentee investigates brutal murders in 1890s New York City in Schildiner’s historical mystery.
In this novel’s opening pages, Sgt. Wilson Hargreave of the New York City Police Department acknowledges learning “some skills from the world’s greatest detective,” and later credits him as a “mentor.” But Hargreave is more rugged and weathered than Holmes, with a past life of crime as part of a gang in Paris and scars on his face and neck. Also, unlike the Holmes stories, Schildiner’s novel is presented in the first person from Hargreave’s perspective as he’s initially approached by a citizen with a problem. Mrs. Stoker-Greene, a well-to-do woman, reports the disappearance of her former maid, Florence Murphy. The missing woman is soon discovered dead—gruesomely slain in the manner of several other women—and Hargreave begins investigating the crimes of someone who seems to be New York City’s equivalent of Jack the Ripper. Along the way, Schildiner builds out the world of turn-of-the-20th-century Manhattan. Although it’s set a few decades later than Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, it similarly portrays a city with simmering tensions between different immigrant groups. Hargreave, who’s French and English and called “Frenchy” by the rival Irish and Russian gangs, is rarely far from a brawl at any given moment. Schildiner also takes time to explore Hargreave’s background and highlight the class differences between him and the upper-crust Stoker-Greene, who wants to join in his investigation: “The wealthy see the police as a form of sanitation employee—necessary for cleaning up the unpleasant aspects of life, but otherwise servants meant to be kept from sight,” Hargreave narrates. While the story never stalls, the cast continues to grow as the cop digs deeper; as a result, some secondary players feel underdeveloped. There’s a fair amount of fighting between moments of deduction, though, with Hargreave showing off his expert knife skills in a series of skirmishes. The novel hints at the possibility of a continuing series, and some readers will eagerly await the next installment.
A clever, engaging spin on Victorian-era crime stories.Pub Date: May 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798326644558
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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