An artful murder mystery overstuffed with conspiracy theories about Christian heresies.
Sherlock Holmes investigates the murder of a religious scholar and seeks a missing manuscript in Doyle’s mystery novel.
Reverend David Adams finds his friend, Canon Alfred Lilly, dead at his desk, and immediately turns to Dr. John Watson for help, knowing that his famous investigatory partner, Sherlock Holmes, will want to scrutinize the scene before it is disturbed. Since there is no sign of theft, the police quickly conclude that Lilly’s death is a suicide, but Holmes can see that he was murdered—minute clues point to a “Mohammedan” who likely lives in Paris. Also, Holmes believes he was murdered for a document—the Jericho Manuscript—that may contain doctrinal heresies so incendiary they could rock the foundations of the Christian Church, heterodoxies as fascinating as they are maddeningly confusing. Much of the book dwells at luxurious length on these heresies (did Jesus have his “phallus” removed?) often based on the paltriest of evidence, including the interpretation of famous pieces of art. In fact, there are so many of these outlandish ideas entertained—some of them no more credible than fantastical conspiracy theories—that a collection of summaries at the conclusion of the novel is all but necessary for the reader’s comprehension. The conceit of the narrative is that the novel’s text is a manuscript composed by Watson, who decided to withhold its publication until a century after his death, a cautionary measure taken considering the implications of the missing manuscript (“The material is still as controversial now, as it would have been then”). For all its convolution, this is a delightfully inventive book, and includes sparkling cameo appearances from famous figures like Debussy, Mallarme, and Baudelaire. Doyle, though, labors a bit too hard to pack so many heretical twists and turns into the plot, creating a textual density that is finally suffocating. The reader occasionally forgets that there is a murder mystery lurking somewhere in the background, a forgivable mistake since the author seems to make it as well.
An artful murder mystery overstuffed with conspiracy theories about Christian heresies.Pub Date: May 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798386292461
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
