An imaginative but uneven fantasy/mystery hybrid that rushes from one plot point to another.
A famous wizard helps a 19th-century Pinkerton detective fight crime in this novel.
In this intriguing mix of magic and crime fighting, Merlin, King Arthur’s wizard—threatened by an evil sorceress—time travels with his wife to 19th-century, post–Civil War Philadelphia. There, he befriends Adam Blake, a Pinkerton detective (the book’s primary focus). Adam tries to prevent a train robbery; his partner is killed; his fiancee—his partner’s twin—jilts him; and he is shadowed by unanswered questions about his detective father. The man was involved peripherally in the circumstances leading to President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination and was shot to death during a bank holdup. To cap Adam’s woes, after taking a hiatus to work with a circus, he is hit by a “shock wave” from a lightning strike. Saved by Merlin’s magic and subsequent prognosticating visions, Adam returns to investigative duties, with Merlin along as an interested observer. Adam’s new case involves archaeological treasures stolen from a museum, murderous villains, ancient Egyptian trinkets, a necklace worn by Cleopatra, a magical “healing cup,” an inept counterfeit money scheme, blackmail, the recovery of a cache of Confederate gold and silver, and clues to Capt. Kidd’s buried treasure. Joining Adam and Merlin is Edward Frost, an investigator for Lloyd’s of London. With unintentionally comic effect, Hetrick establishes Edward’s and Merlin’s bona fides as Englishmen through their use of such Wodehousian terms as by Jove, jolly good, old chap, and rollicking good time. The author succeeds in tying the many disparate elements to the fates of Lincoln and Adam’s father and adds some scene-setting depth with knowledgeable descriptions of shipyards and trains. Still, so much material packed into under 150 pages gives the novel the quality of an outline that could more credibly have been fleshed out into a series. And Hetrick should consider trimming entirely a tone-deaf and gratuitous train station encounter between White woman Rita Sims and Ezra, a Black man who became a porter after she “released him from being her slave” and who flashes her “a broad smile, showing a mouthful of white teeth.”
An imaginative but uneven fantasy/mystery hybrid that rushes from one plot point to another. (author bio)Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-66320-090-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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