Hubbard expounds on the ways winemaking and drinking are deeply embedded in French culture while her charming protagonists...
Hubbard’s trilogy of lovingly forged mysteries about the beauty and culture of France (Bordeaux: The Bitter Finish, 2014, etc.) draws to an end with a case much too close to home.
NYPD Detective Max Maguire is the product of a marriage between Hank, a now-retired NYPD officer, and Juliette, an aristocratic Frenchwoman disowned by her family for marrying him. In solving wine-related murders and investigating French culture and her own roots, Max has managed a reconciliation with her grandmother Isabelle—and now she and her parents have arrived in Burgundy to stay with her. Max has had an on-again, off-again romance with Olivier Chaumont, an investigating magistrate who’s moving to Paris to join the terrorism squad along with his longtime assistant, Abdel Zeroual. Olivier plans to stay at his family home in Burgundy while he and Max decide whether their love affair will lead to marriage. Meantime, Isabelle and her friend Anne are upset with the disappearance of a striking young American girl whose help with the grape harvest has led her to develop a love for wine. Lucy Kendrick, who claims to be 21, is really a 17-year-old searching for her biological father, who’s French. All the while, she’s pursued by the uncle who stuck her in a psychiatric institute in order to control her inheritance. Lucy was last seen at a party given by a drug-dealing private detective who was working both ends against the middle before being pushed off his balcony. She’s the object of several people’s desire, from a British B&B owner and photographer to the sullen teen son of one of Olivier’s childhood friends. The next time anyone sees Lucy is when she's shot during a local boar hunt and almost dies, and both Max and Hank are even more determined to solve both crimes than Olivier, whose friends turn out to be major suspects in another murder.
Hubbard expounds on the ways winemaking and drinking are deeply embedded in French culture while her charming protagonists solve murders—in this case, a complex puzzle that touches on the threat of terrorism lurking throughout France today.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0559-0
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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