MÜNSTER'S CASE

Name: MÜNSTER'S CASE
Author: Håkan Nesser
ISBN: 978-0-307-90686-1

by Håkan Nesser & translated by Laurie Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2012

Münster, who feels very much like a stopgap sleuth, cuts an even less assuming figure than Van Veeteren, who pops up as a...

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Throughout his first five appearances translated into English (The Inspector and Silence, 2011, etc.), Chief Inspector Van Veeteren has constantly threatened to retire, but this time he seems to mean it, leaving the scant detecting honors here to Inspector Münster.

Waldemar Leverkuhn’s lucky day, which begins when he splits a lottery prize of 20,000 guilders with three old friends, ends when he’s stabbed 28 times as he sleeps off his drunken celebration. That same night, fellow winner Felix Bonger goes missing from his houseboat, and shortly thereafter so does Else Van Eck, the wife of the caretaker in Leverkuhn’s building. The Leverkuhn children are no help in Münster’s investigation. The eldest daughter, Irene, has been a patient in a mental hospital for years, and her lesbian sister Ruth and weak-kneed brother Mauritz haven’t remained close enough to their parents to offer any helpful information. The biggest break in the case comes when Leverkuhn’s wife, Marie-Louise, who’s been acting more shocked than grief-stricken, suddenly confesses to his murder and—this being an unspecified fictional country that combines features of Sweden, Finland and Holland, but certainly not the U.S.—is promptly put on trial. From beginning to end, in fact, the case is driven not by any discoveries the police make but by developments outside their control.

Münster, who feels very much like a stopgap sleuth, cuts an even less assuming figure than Van Veeteren, who pops up as a kind of Greek chorus from time to time to remind you that it’s his franchise. The mystery, like the detection, manages to be both routine and gripping.

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-307-90686-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS

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by Åsa Larsson ; translated by Laurie Thompson

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

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EVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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THREE BAGS FULL

A SHEEP DETECTIVE STORY

by Leonie Swann & translated by Anthea Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2007

All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...

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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.