An immensely entertaining, if overlong, shipboard tale starring a striking sleuth who “remembers things.”
In this second installment of a mystery series, a rich socialite is threatened with death aboard the Queen Mary.
Alexandra Durant, a young psychology postdoctoral candidate–turned–amateur sleuth, is called to Eisenhower-era New York City by wealthy socialite Mrs. Adelaide Dabney in order to investigate a bizarre chain of events. Dabney is a 90-year-old widow beloved by everybody. While she’s innocently planning an overseas voyage to attend the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco, she’s begun receiving ominous notes warning her not to make the trip. At first, Alexandra seems surrounded by potential suspects: Dabney’s lawyer/bodyguard Glen Cleary; her great-niece, the beautiful but unemployed actress Jacqueline Lane; Jackie’s fiance, Greg Hopper; Dabney’s pompous and overbearing nephew, Philip; and even Madame Delavue, the fortuneteller who’s gained the older woman’s confidence. As the plot moves onboard the Queen Mary, the suspects increase, including both Dabney’s old friend Mr. Hendry and an oddly belligerent entomologist named Spencer Seward (who “always enjoyed squashing bugs”). While observing all these characters and trying to sort through their varying backstories, Alexandra continues to be haunted by her own tale, both her involvement in the traumatic prior case that originally brought her to Dabney’s attention and her ongoing worries about her mother, who’s in a care facility suffering from increasing memory loss. As the clues continue to multiply, Alexandra wonders if the writer of those menacing notes is a member of Dabney’s inner circle—and if there might be a murderer on board.
Giebfried and Wells skillfully mix all of these standard plot elements into something that feels fresh and snappy. A great deal of this can be attributed to the wise decision to tell the entire story from the first-person perspective of Alexandra, by far the tale’s best-realized character, a young woman haunted by her mother’s illness-induced loss of memory and her own inability to forget things. Alexandra is a sharp and uncompromising lens through which readers view what is otherwise a fairly one-dimensional supporting cast of suspects. The luxury liner atmosphere is well captured (“By the time the Grand Marnier crêpes arrived with flames dancing atop them,” Alexandra “was feeling particularly well-fed and content”), and the authors do a good job of planting red herrings. But some of the hints can be heavy-handed. For example, when Seward describes the ladybird spider—“The mother lays eighty or so eggs, then digests herself after they’re hatched so her spiderlings can feed off her body”—readers won’t need a road map to see the parallels with Dabney. Yet the book’s biggest flaw is its most obvious: Its captivating but by-the-numbers plot in no way justifies its enormous length. Readers will find it difficult to avoid the feeling that this is a 300-page novel buried somewhere in 561 pages. Fortunately, thanks to the authors’ narrative zest, even this misstep is enjoyable. The characters and dialogue keep things moving along even after most of the actual tension has dissipated.
An immensely entertaining, if overlong, shipboard tale starring a striking sleuth who “remembers things.”Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2022
ISBN: 9798498639758
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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