A routine whodunit in the mold of Christie and Sayers, both of whom are cited. Only Maria, outspoken and matter-of-fact,...
Maria Kallio may have taken herself out of the Helsinki police, but she finds when she’s confronted with another murder that she can’t take the detective out of herself.
No longer an officer with the Violent Crime Unit but not quite a lawyer yet either, Maria has moved in with math student Antti Sarkela while he works on his dissertation in the Tapiola region of Espoo. The setting may be idyllic, but the people aren’t. When Antti brings Maria to a party given by the family his sister has married into, the vibe is awkward since the Hänninens are still mourning their daughter and sister Sanna, who drowned last spring shortly after downing serious quantities of alcohol and prescription drugs. Sanna’s brother Kimmo has gotten engaged to Armi Mäenpää, a chatty nurse with boundary issues. So Maria isn’t looking forward to having a heart-to-heart with her the day after the party. She’s got nothing to worry about, though, because by that afternoon Armi is dead, strangled, presumably by someone who was worried about her big mouth. Ignoring the fact that she’s no longer with the police, Maria makes the rounds of the obligatory suspects—mostly members of Kimmo’s family—from Kimmo’s father, Henrik, a businessman who’s distant in more ways than one, to his much older half brother Risto, an engineer whose marriage won’t bear close scrutiny. There’ll be a trip to an S&M club Kimmo frequented and a climactic confrontation in which even the killer can’t resist pointing out that Maria’s no longer wearing a badge or carrying a gun.
A routine whodunit in the mold of Christie and Sayers, both of whom are cited. Only Maria, outspoken and matter-of-fact, stands out from the crowd.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-611099645
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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