A sprawling, ambitious thriller for readers with a taste for florid invention and broad strokes of the supernatural.
The creepiest painting ever encountered in fiction or real life sends a beleaguered Italian police officer searching for the killer in a 70-year-old case.
Before he gave up painting at the age of 23, Alessio Andrian completed fewer than a dozen pictures. Raffaello Andrian, the artist’s great-nephew, has offered the last of them, The Sleeping Nymph, to gallery owner Gianmaria Gortan, whose routine tests of the painting have disclosed something deeply disturbing: the presence of blood. The Sleeping Nymph isn’t marred by traces of blood; the whole painting has been executed in blood—and not the artist’s own—mixed with the odd bit of cardiac tissue, as if to establish its authenticity. Charged with investigating the presumed murder of the sleeping nymph, Superintendent Teresa Battaglia finds that Alessio Andrian, though he’s still alive, hasn’t spoken since he completed the picture in 1945. So she follows the nymph’s trail to the Slovenian region of Resia, where she’s swiftly caught up in tales of the artist’s resistance to the occupying Germans as the war wound down. As a present-day murder forces her to ask whether she’s really looking for a single killer pushing 90, she has to contend with two other adversaries: Albert Lona, an old enemy who’s stepped in to replace her suddenly stricken boss, and her own creeping dementia, which she’s struggling to keep secret. It’s lucky that she can obtain the services of Smoky, an amazingly talented Human Remains Detection dog, and Blanca Zago, his blind trainer, because she’ll need all the help she can get.
A sprawling, ambitious thriller for readers with a taste for florid invention and broad strokes of the supernatural.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-641-29121-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.
Is the potential return of a series villain the end for a clever detective and his daughter, a true-crime author, in the last book in Jackson’s Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya series?
On the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans, an unnamed killer is plotting his next crime with satisfaction. He’s been waiting a long time to go after Kristi Bentz and end her string of true-crime bestsellers. But when the murderer makes his move, he’s thrown off course by the unexpected arrival of Kristi’s husband, Jay McKnight. In the ensuing struggle, Jay is killed and Kristi left in shock. Her father, Det. Rick Bentz, wants to comfort his daughter, but he and partner Det. Reuben Montoya have other things to worry about when an earlier case resurfaces in a way that seems impossible. They’d thought Father John, a fake priest obsessed with killing women in the name of God, was dead after their last face-off, but their most recent string of cases follow his M.O. to a T: working girls choked to death by a string of sharpened rosary beads. Is Father John back, or do Bentz and Montoya have a copycat on their hands? The case is clearly linked to Kristi, who wrote a hit book on the so-called Rosary Killer and whose agent is demanding she do press and a follow-up volume. As Kristi worries that the unnamed killer may just be waiting to strike again, help arrives in the form of mysterious stranger Cruz Montoya, Reuben’s brother, who may need Kristi’s help.
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781496739056
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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