A brainy if sometimes saggy novel that presents a different spin on the prison-camp novel.
Serving time in the mid-1920s in the notorious Solovetsky prison labor camp, located on an island that used to be a monastery, a 20-year-old student is pressed to help investigate the murder of a fellow prisoner with whom he was acquainted.
The student, Anatoly "Tolya" Bogomolov, was convicted of possessing forbidden books. The dead man, Gennady Antonov, found floating in the bay, had been in charge of restoring prized icons in the former monastery building. Tolya is drawn to the investigation, which requires him to deal with fussy, aging detective Petrovich, for two reasons: The job will lighten his labor in the camp and improve his "accommodations," and he is a fan of forensic crime novels featuring such sleuths as Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, and Nat Pinkerton. But with a real killer on the loose, Tolya discovers the folly of "modeling [himself] on literary detectives." At the risk of becoming the next victim, and upsetting the authorities, he must get close to a female prisoner with whom Antonov had an affair; uncover the significance of the icons, which were in the possession of monks when the monastery occupied the space; and uncover a secret conspiracy involving White Army officers. Tolya's account, which stretches into the 1930s and '40s, is written in the form of a detective novel. By turns clever and revealing, May's novel keeps the brutality largely in the background while following Tolya's more intellectual interests. The narrative can get dry, but this is a fine debut.
A brainy if sometimes saggy novel that presents a different spin on the prison-camp novel.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-883285-84-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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