In this installment of the Bertrand McAbee Mystery series, the former classics professor and current private investigator is drawn into a cold case of theft and murder that spans generations and continents and finds roots in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
When a colleague dies on a lonely road late at night under questionable circumstances, McAbee’s investigation turns up links to local thugs, the Chicago Mafia and even World War I war criminals. And as he untangles the web, McAbee discovers that at the heart of it all lies a priceless, jewel-encrusted Hapsburg heirloom—commissioned by the Archduke himself and not seen in almost 100 years—that, incredibly, may be hidden away in the state of Ohio, or may not exist at all. McAbee, a likable, albeit conflicted protagonist, goes out of his way to defy the hardboiled gumshoe stereotype: he drinks nonalcoholic beer, eschews the advances of beautiful women and steadfastly refuses to carry a gun, even when faced with obvious mortal danger. Given all this, one might reasonably expect a cerebral sequence in which McAbee shows his detective chops and gathers evidence, utilizes all his powers of observation to connect the dots and solves the mystery while the police are still scrambling to keep up. Instead, McAbee calls in a crack team of former SEALs to illegally and brutally torture information out of suspects by administering shocks to their nether-regions. He gets answers, but Sherlock Holmes he is not—this solution feels a bit unsatisfying and contrived. The hypocrisy is glaring, and one character briefly calls him out on it, but the reader never gets a straight answer about this contradiction, or an explanation of why an aging college professor has ready access to a torture-happy version of the A-Team. In McAbee we have a hero who won’t carry a gun for moralistic reasons, yet has no problem outsourcing torture. Despite this uneven characterization, McCaffrey (Scholarly Executions, 2005, etc.) keeps the plot moving at a good clip, ramping up tension while McAbee manages the diverse and bickering group of characters that comprises his investigative team. While the story takes place in the present day, the author utilizes flashbacks with several characters to 1914 pre-war Austria, 1920s Italy and the gangland Chicago of the ’40s to gradually parcel out all the clues. The pre-WWI historical background and international intrigue distinguish this gripping and at times addictive mystery from the standard whodunits.
Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 978-1420854886
Page Count: 307
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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