A minor mystery buttressed by interesting tidbits on bookbinding and Mark Twain.
Murder dogs a festival devoted to all things Mark Twain.
Bookbinder Brooklyn Wainwright and her dangerously sexy husband, security specialist Derek Stone, are both doing work for wealthy newspaper owner and bibliophile Joseph Cabot. Brooklyn’s running a bookbinding workshop at the magnificent Covington Library, where she plans to refurbish The Prince and the Pauper as part of the festival. She’s intimidated by Joseph’s second wife, Ella, and Ella's supercilious mother, Ingrid, a pair of humorless Swedish beauties. At a party at the library, Joseph introduces some of the festival activities, including a contest offering a $100,000 prize to whomever looks the most like—not Mark Twain—Joseph himself. During a posher party at Cabot’s mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, where Derek’s providing security, he and Brooklyn overhear an argument between Ingrid and Cabot’s butler, Hobson. The winning look-alike, down-at-heels book lover Tom Cantwell, bears such a striking resemblance to Cabot that his wife and mother-in-law are truly uneasy. And then Joseph announces that he and Tom are going to imitate Twain’s book and actually change places. Not everything goes smoothly, though: Hobson refuses to serve as Tom’s butler while Cabot is busy taking Tom’s place as a janitor. The next morning, Hobson opens an envelope that had been delivered for Joseph; moments later, he falls to the floor and dies. Brooklyn realizes that the papers he was holding were coated with a poisonous formula featured in an exhibit at the library. Brooklyn and Derek’s attempts to determine who wanted to kill Hobson, or possibly Cabot, is made more difficult by several attempts on Tom’s life.
A minor mystery buttressed by interesting tidbits on bookbinding and Mark Twain.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59320-146-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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