Beguiling. For fans of mysteries, postmodern fiction and fine bookmaking: a book that makes demands of its reader, but that...
A delightful, endlessly unfolding fiction that is meta beyond meta, a sort of Da Vinci Code for smart people.
When lead author Abrams isn’t busy rebooting the Star Trek film series, he’s cooking up puzzles, mysteries and legerdemain. With lieutenant Dorst (Alive in Necropolis, 2008, etc.), he’s conjured up a fine frame on which to hang the enterprise: a sort of gothic romance—though of the Horace Walpole rather than Barbara Cartland sort—called Ship of Theseus (a title that, as game theory enthusiasts will know, itself conjures up a thorny philosophical puzzle). Written by a Poe-esque poet named V. M. Straka, the invented piece is a study in gloominess: “The stolen look becomes a prolonged study, not of the devastation but of the figure he notices skulking at the foot of the port’s only lighthouse, hidden from the shooters and watching S. recede into the dark, perhaps even waving once before S. disappears from view.” Weaving its way through this book is a second story, marginal notes exchanged by a young man and young woman who sometimes flirt and sometimes fret, puzzling over Straka’s yarn while gabbing their way toward resolution over their own lives (“I seriously doubt your dad is some evil Bouchard person.” “I know. But it makes the marketing job even more repulsive. Don’t want to be any part of that world.” “Hard to avoid. Maybe impossible.”) The twin narratives, spinning in and out of each other like loopy helixes, are absorbing enough, but the most impressive thing about this shaggy-dog story is its physical form: a book that looks every bit like the 1949-issue stolen library book that it is supposed to be, hatched with doodles and annotations and underlinings, its pages full of laid-in treasures: postcards, letters, notes, photographs and, yes, a decoder wheel. The book is a simulacrum as wondrous as the one the protagonist of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore invents—and if this book has a spiritual twin, it’s Robin Sloan’s lively 2012 tale.
Beguiling. For fans of mysteries, postmodern fiction and fine bookmaking: a book that makes demands of its reader, but that amply entertains in return.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20164-3
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2013
PROFILES
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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