A fast, fulfilling read with plenty of twists.
An offbeat whodunit that will prompt readers to wonder: Did “it” actually happen?
In his fifth novel, Harries seems to blend elements of memoir and fiction as he tells the complex story of his ancestors, inspired by taking a genetic ancestry test. In a style that calls to mind the Sherlock Holmes tales, the author methodically excavates the roots of his family tree and uncovers a dark “family business.” His initial research focuses on his great-grandfather Abram Isakowitsch, who moved from his native Riga to the United Kingdom in 1888. Nothing so strange about that, but it’s not long until the events that Harries recounts start to stretch credulity. Isakowitsch changes his name to Abraham Harris, whom government documents identify as a tailor—an occupation he never held. Shockers start early on with the author’s discovery that his great-grandfather owned a pub where one of Jack the Ripper’s victims was last seen. Even more jaw-dropping details follow, as “Harris” was a former operative of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, for whom he was a prized assassin (last known body count: 78). When panic began to grip London in 1888 over the Ripper murders, Britain’s prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, recruited Harris to track down and assassinate the infamous serial killer, according to the author’s research. The book slides between different time periods as Harris recounts adventures and misadventures of other ancestors. The chapter format makes it easy to follow the tangled timelines by listing the dates, locations, and cast of characters at the start of each. Later, the author learns, his mother’s great-aunt Mina Kapelus (a member of the Left SR Party) participated in a botched attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918; in response, the Bolsheviks killed her and displayed her coffin on the street. Or did they? Harries teases readers with a subtitle that brands the book of “Dubious Veracity,” and he quips before the story begins, “The truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not as much fun. That is, of course, if you believe I’m not telling the truth.” Throughout, he displays consummate skill as a spinner of mysteries, and he recounts them all with a welcome and unexpected dash of humor.
A fast, fulfilling read with plenty of twists.Pub Date: June 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950628-08-7
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
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