Some okay material about the New York School fails to redeem a generally lackluster effort.
A third art-and-murder cocktail from Santlofer (Color Blind, 2004, etc.).
The same protagonist, too: Kate McKinnon, New York City cop turned modern art historian, but ready to sleuth again when family or friends are victims. Here, good friend and art patron Nicholas Starrett’s body is found in his Long Island home next to a slashed painting worth millions. A Pollock and a de Kooning have previously been slashed in the city. At each site, the vandal leaves small black-and-white paintings (the author, himself an artist, created and reproduced them in the book as a lagniappe); they provide clues to the killer’s next attack. It’s helpful, too, that all the paintings are by the New York School, those 1940s Abstract Expressionists about whom Kate is writing a book. (Santlofer cleverly commingles real and invented artists.) Six cases of murder plus vandalism form the main storyline, but there are two other major plot elements. One involves art world politics—the key to the identity of the killer—and offers a glimpse of a feisty old female painter reminiscing that shows Santlofer at his best. He’s at his worst, though, when detailing the fencing of stolen artwork. In an orgy of violence: a fence has her tongue cut out by her biggest client, a Colombian drug kingpin, while his goons kill two cops and a crooked museum director. Santlofer keeps Kate well away from this unpleasantness as she and Detective Murphy follow up those painting clues. At one point, Kate is way behind the reader in matching initials to a name, a disconcerting lapse for our art-savvy heroine. Still, she is always super-cool, even as her adrenaline surges, and she handles the climax with aplomb, though the full story of the killer/vandal is preposterous.
Some okay material about the New York School fails to redeem a generally lackluster effort.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-054107-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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