A sure hit for the audience of this CSI subgenre, the rest of us need not visit this Island.
A historical fantasy set in England in the last quarter of the 18th century, this novel features the intrepid detective duo: pert widow Mrs. Harriet Westerman and severe Gabriel Crowther.
This is Robertson’s third Westerman/Crowther novel, and the second after Anatomy of Murder (2012) to appear in the U.S. this year. Obeying the conventions of the many genres increasingly conditioned by film, each section of the book notes the date, each chapter follows multiple stories simultaneously. The action takes place in a single week in the Lake Country in and around the town of Keswick. In the prologue, we read of the suitably melodramatic circumstances in which Gabriel renounced his name and title. Fast-forward 22 years: Crowther receives a letter from his sister, “the Vizegräfin Margret von Bolsenheim, is staying in our former home with her son as guests of the current owner. And they have found a body.” So begins a journey for Crowther into his past, into the origin of his family wealth, and the fate of The Luck, “a jeweled cross” that disappeared in 1715. Westerman, her young son, Stephen, and his tutor, Mr. Quince, travel with Crowther to join his bitter sister and her spoiled son, Felix, to enjoy the Austen-esque hospitality of Silverside Hall. After determining the cause of the desiccated corpse’s death, Crowther and Westerman turn their attention to the murder of a visiting Viennese gentleman. We learn that Hurst and his daughter, Sophia, have a claim on the feckless Felix, and suspicion falls on him—naturally. The local “cunning-man,” a sort of white witch named Casper Grace, features prominently. The hooks of the elaborate plot points are checked in color-coded ink: the bad meet bad ends, the good are rewarded, the arrogant are wounded and see with new eyes.
A sure hit for the audience of this CSI subgenre, the rest of us need not visit this Island.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02627-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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