Fans of historical fiction will admire the setting, but the plot and resounding characters will leave mystery fans aglow.
Dougherty and McBrien are back in Mulligan’s latest historical thriller (The Haystack, 2012, etc.); the doctor and the pharmacist investigate a murder and unravel what may be the work of a serial killer.
In mid-19-century Pennsylvania, town physician Maj. James Dougherty is called when miners are injured in a cave-in. Dougherty finds a man, Brogan, buried in the rubble, but a bullet hole in the body suggests foul play. The doctor; his friend and pharmacist, Sean McBrien; and Dougherty’s wife, Jen, peruse letters and newspaper clippings that Brogan left behind and realize that the dead man may have been on the trail of a murderer. The novel is an incisive murder mystery that takes advantage of its historical backdrop—it’s set months after the Civil War, in which both Dougherty and McBrien fought. Obstacles for the heroes (the local director of the mining company tries to steer the investigation in another direction involving a secret society) and short passages featuring the killer generate suspense. The mystery is predominant in the book, but Mulligan does inject finer character traits that enhance the story, like Jen’s envy of a widow’s two boys—the young wife recently lost her child at birth. Brogan’s documents, consisting mostly of witness testimonies and newspaper articles, dominate too much of the story. They do establish the killer’s pattern but some might have been summarized in lieu of being presented verbatim. The newspaper stories brim with assurances that the murderer has been caught or killed (when readers know he’s alive and well) and, as the investigation eventually proves, quite a bit of misinformation—the narrative ultimately concedes the power of “black ink upon white paper.” The leads are strong, but they’re eclipsed by an unnerving psychopathic killer (he calls himself the Diarist; others are more direct, preferring the Butcher); and amateur sleuth Jen, who kisses her husband goodbye only after ordering him “to bring back a full report.”
Fans of historical fiction will admire the setting, but the plot and resounding characters will leave mystery fans aglow.Pub Date: July 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491094723
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2014
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
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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