Well-written, tightly plotted, a successful second entry. The byplay between Emma, the Dragon Lady, and not-so-silly Billie...
It isn’t that Emma Howe truly regrets her decision to add Billie August to the staff of Howe Investigations (Time and Trouble, 1998); it’s just that every now and then Billie makes her nervous. She’s a little too good-looking, a little too sensitive, Emma thinks, to make it in the hardscrabble world of professional snooping—a little too unlike her boss. At a cursory glance they do seem ill-matched: broad-shouldered, broad-beamed warhorse Emma, 55, and sleek, understated thoroughbred Billie, 26. Still, confront them with a complex crime, and it’s amazing to see how alike their reactions are. Suddenly, Howe Investigations has two juicy bits on its plate: the mystery of a long-hidden identity, a case involving murder and a prime collection of secrets and lies; and the grisly death of a young woman, allegedly at the hands of their mentally-challenged client. Clues are scarce in both cases, which will be resolved only by toughing it out with stubborn resolution. Bullheaded Emma cracks one, doggedly determined Billie the other. And in the process, this sleuthing odd couple comes to experience a closer sisterhood than they’ve ever felt before.
Well-written, tightly plotted, a successful second entry. The byplay between Emma, the Dragon Lady, and not-so-silly Billie continues refreshingly believable and unfailingly lively. Roberts, author of the feather-light Amanda Pepper series, is on to something more substantial with Howe and August.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26269-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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