A rich, nuanced tale, ideal for beach reading, just as long as the beach doesn’t harbor too many shadows.
Superb, spooky whodunit from the Swedish couple who write as Kepler (The Nightmare, 2012, etc.).
Considering the nasty things that the likes of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and now Kepler have been turning up underneath Sweden’s soft, pine-clad, liberal veneer, it seems surprising that the entire country has not emigrated to safer climes. Some cannot, though, notably the young women who live at a home for wayward youth in the country’s chilly north—a place where Very Bad Things are about to happen. The mayhem begins with the extremely graphic murder of a ward nurse (“She cannot see her body lying on the floor or the dog sneaking in and tentatively lapping the blood leaking from her crushed head”), and that’s just the start. Enter world-weary detective Joona Linna, whom one of the girls tellingly calls “the Finn” and who really shouldn’t be on the case; he’s in trouble, it seems, for having leaked information to a leftist group back home in Stockholm, and in any event, he’s a little shellshocked, “searching for that mental stillness that will allow him to observe and not give in to the impulse to look away.” There’s plenty to look away from, though Joona immediately sees things that others do not, even as one of his informants sees a malevolent ghost in the hallways. But why would someone, real or supernatural, go to all the work of killing a nurse and trying to pin it on a troubled kid? Ah, cherchez la chose: Someone wants something, and that someone figures in the worst of Joona’s dreams and case files. As the story unfolds, the mad look sane and the sane look mad, and Kepler’s novel turns from simple mystery to an intriguing, satisfying blend of police procedural and horror story.
A rich, nuanced tale, ideal for beach reading, just as long as the beach doesn’t harbor too many shadows.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-29866-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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