Holmes is consistently upstaged by Russell, but King, whose strengths are historical evocation rather than tightly knit...
An ocean voyage to Japan lands Sherlock Holmes and his amanuensis and wife, Mary Russell (Garment of Shadows, 2012, etc.), in the middle of a tangled web of blackmail.
Most of the passengers aboard the Thomas Carlyle are tedious English types, but there are some interesting exceptions: the Earl of Darley, whom Holmes has already spotted as an amateur blackmailer; his well-turned-out second wife, Lady Charlotte Bridgeford Darley; his gossipy son, Viscount Thomas Darley; Haruki Sato, an NYU-trained economist who comes from a family of acrobats; and a poltergeist intent on playing tricks with the guests’ belongings. It’s not long before Haruki-san and Russell have bonded over lessons in Japanese language and culture, and not long after that, the young Japanese woman persuades Holmes to follow a trail she lays in Japan. The trail, which involves a good deal of more intensive learning and a fair amount of testing for Holmes and Russell, leads to a most unusual request from the highest levels. Can they retrieve a precious volume the emperor of Japan gave King George V a year ago, a volume now offered for sale to the emperor by none other than the blackmailing Lord Darley? Holmes and Russell come close to completing their mission in Japan, but their treasure hunt won’t end until they’re back in Russell’s beloved Oxford, along with the requisite members of the shipboard cast.
Holmes is consistently upstaged by Russell, but King, whose strengths are historical evocation rather than tightly knit plotting (The Bones of Paris, 2013, etc.), manages more surprises than usual in this graceful exercise in cultural tourism–cum-intrigue.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53179-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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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BOOK REVIEW
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