A compelling account of how the toll of war extends far beyond the battlefield.
A World War II widow solves a crime the police would rather ignore.
Loosely following the story of forensic-science pioneer Frances Glessner Lee, Tietjen relates the sad tale of Mabel “Maple” Bishop, a lawyer who moved with her husband, Bill, a physician, to rural Vermont in search of a safer and kinder life than the one they’d had in Boston. After Bill’s death in a field hospital in France, Maple learns that his estate amounts to a meager $12.67. Bill’s willingness to treat Elderberry’s sick whether or not they could pay had left his practice in the red. Despite her husband’s generosity, the people of Elderberry still regard Maple as an outsider, and, on top of that, no one will hire a woman to work as a lawyer. Maple has gotten to know Ben Crenshaw, owner of the local hardware store, while buying supplies to make meticulously crafted dollhouses. When he suggests she might want to display her dollhouses in his store and sell them, her hobby becomes a means of supporting herself. But while delivering her first sale to local farmer’s wife Angela Wallace, Maple makes a grim discovery: Angela’s husband, Elijah, hanging from a noose in his barn. The police dismiss Elijah’s death as an accident, but Maple believes otherwise. Now her dollhouses take on a third life: from pastime to livelihood to crime-fighting tool. To prod the police into action, Maple recreates the crime scene in miniature to show how an accidental death was impossible. Her efforts are wasted on Sheriff Sam Scott, but Kenny, a young officer-in-training, takes an interest and joins forces with Maple to discover the truth. Firm, uncompromising, and sometimes rubbing her neighbors the wrong way, Maple sees details others overlook and, guided by an unwavering moral compass, pursues questions the police have left open. Tietjen gives all of her characters rich, full inner lives as they interact in ways that are both aesthetically and morally complex.
A compelling account of how the toll of war extends far beyond the battlefield.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781639107186
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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