“You’re really something,” the incredulous police chief tells the hero. “You want everything tied together.” Well, yes. This...
A private eye’s dogged search for his wife’s killer uncovers a cascade of murder that reaches back 20 years.
In the two years since his wife, photographer Olivia Makinnen, was strangled on the shore of the Huron River, Jack Pellum has thought of nothing but the man he’s convinced killed her: a man wearing a fedora whom he’d spotted in the neighborhood a few days before she died. He’s left the Detroit PD to pursue the case, hung up posters with a sketch of the man, and badgered Carl Dumisani, his former partner, for leads about similar murders. Now there’s a lead so promising it’s eerie. Just this week, Daniel Cavanaugh, a writer who hanged himself after his own wife’s death, painted a message on his wall: “There’s a killer, and he wears a crooked hat.” Convinced beyond reason that the two men in hats are the same, Jack tears into Cavanaugh’s background with the ferocity of a starving mastiff. He discovers that Cavanaugh’s friend, odd-job man Paul Rook, saw the man in the hat nine years ago, two days before his mother, Bonnie Rook, was murdered, and that Cavanaugh’s brother, Alex, was killed a decade before that. Unable to convince either Dumisani or Belleville Police Chief Keely Tanager that these deaths are all connected, Jack plows on and discovers still more victims. Dolan reveals in the opening chapter that the man Jack is looking for is Michael Underhill, a blandly self-excusing type whose unassuming profile makes him both easy to overlook and deeply disturbing. But although no human power can distract Jack from his mission, the impending mano a mano is deferred by a number of ungainly complications that make Dolan’s extravagantly plotted earlier thrillers (The Last Dead Girl, 2014, etc.) look like models of coherence.
“You’re really something,” the incredulous police chief tells the hero. “You want everything tied together.” Well, yes. This investigation, at once remorselessly logical and remarkably diffuse, invites readers who want the same thing to take a closer look in the mirror.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-15797-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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