What Dickens might have written had he set loose Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll to explore the doomsday trade.
Framing the mystery within Weir’s (Daniel O’Thunder, 2011) novel is an extraordinary rendition of life in Regency-era London.
The eponymous narrator awaits the noose at Newgate Prison. Will is innocent, but he's tainted by his association with the resurrection trade, provenance of those willing to haul a fresh corpse to the porter at Guy’s Hospital for dissection. It’s 1816. Many surgeons returned from the Napoleonic War expert with scalpel and bone saw. What had been a barbarous, bloody business began integrating into medicine as treatment, leading to a demand for cadavers to train prospective surgeons. Grave-robbing resurrection men supplied hospitals and surgeons like Dionysus Atherton, "brightest rising star in the chirurgical firmament." Others, like Will’s employer, Alec Comrie, "a growling Scotsman with a bonesaw," avoid the ghouls. Weir’s worth reading simply for his characters: grave-robber Jemmy Cheese, with "too much imagination for it"; his pawn-shop–owning brother, Edward Cheshire, a "scholard"; and prostitute Meg Nancarrow, "beautiful...in the way a small fierce thing can have beauty." A man’s murdered over a resurrection secret. With Meg hanged for it, Atherton becomes "shipwrecked into obsession" over the idea the "dead may be summoned back." Weir has written a mystery worthy of every word while adding historical tidbits about foundling homes housing "[b]its of flotsam no one cares about"; the Bow Street Runners; slums like St. Giles, that "vast appalling rookery"; and Keats as a medical student. Characters rollick and scheme through a plot as snaky as a London alley in a setting as powerful as a chamber pot tossed from a garret window. No happy tale this, but Starling’s adventures among the Spavined Clerk, the Wreck of Tom Sheldrake, Boggle-Eyed Bob and Alf the Ale-Draper are a delight all the same.
What Dickens might have written had he set loose Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll to explore the doomsday trade.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-58642-230-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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