Sturdy plot elements and a multidimensional protagonist make this mystery an involving read.
Storms, secrets, and murder complicate a lawyer’s life in Alaska in the third Maeve Malloy mystery by Anchorage-based attorney Powell, the author of Hemlock Needle (2019).
Maeve Malloy is at a crossroads. She was briefly suspended from the bar after a hangover caused her to mishandle a legal case, and now that she’s free to return to practicing law, Malloy isn’t yet ready to go back to being a public defender. Bills wait for no one, however, and she takes a job as a kitchen helper at Fox Island Lodge outside Seward. Upon arriving, Malloy finds the lodge to be low on people, with just a couple of staff members and a handful of guests. The morning after a stormy night, the already small number drops by one when a murder victim is found outside. Due to the weather, the state troopers can’t reach the lodge, so Malloy steps in to bag the evidence and take witness statements. Unpleasant secrets come to light, and Malloy has to deal with vengeful parties, a hungrily bold bear, and at least one person whose sanity is very much in question. The majestic natural beauty of Alaska might seem like an unusual backdrop for a crime series in which the protagonist is an attorney, but without descending into cliché, Powell uses the setting and culture of Alaska deftly, showing the individualism and looser perspective on justice that draw people to a land still seen as a frontier by many. Malloy is a fully rounded creation: smart and careful yet struggling with alcoholism and self-doubt, she is both capable and believably flawed. The complications emerge in realistic ways so that even aspects that seem unlikely—such as having a nonpracticing attorney essentially open a police investigation—come across as natural to the narrative and not authorial contrivance. Background information is doled out steadily, and while there is a central mystery, the focus of the story is more on exploring the history of a family and those connected to it in intimate, terrible ways. This narrative thrust frees the book from the stereotypical genre constructions and allows the tale to go in directions that would be more constrained in a purely genre exercise.
Sturdy plot elements and a multidimensional protagonist make this mystery an involving read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
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
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