“What fucking people there are and what fucking lives they live,” reflects one grim flatfoot. Just so. Persson does a fine...
Engaging Swedish whodunit, the first of a trilogy—reminiscent of the work of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson in its toughness, and just as cynical in its politics.
A story that begins with the brutal death of a deaf dog may not be entirely promising, at least for the animal lovers in the audience, but that memorable episode suits Persson’s purposes just fine: Though leafy and full of nice wood furniture, Sweden, suggests the author—in his spare time a psychological profiler for the national police—is full of unhinged folks who would not think twice about committing such dastardly deeds as dispatching “an admittedly old Pomeranian” by means of a falling body who just happens to be an American of some interest to the international community. But homegrown loonies don’t hold a candle to the assorted nutcases and psychopaths filling the ranks of the security forces of the superpowers, as with one CIA officer who once haunted the Stockholm embassy while nursing anti-Semitic grudges, brooding about better times and hoarding scrap metal. Ah well, shrugs the lead investigating officer, “This country is full of crazy people who collect such things.” The case gets ever uglier, and if the spooks are nasty, the Stockholm cops charged with hunting down the usual suspects are decidedly incompetent. The main character is a world-weary exception, a police superintendent who seems to be living for retirement, showing “disturbing signs of wavering conviction since he’d left the field campaign against criminality to take it easy behind a series of ever-larger desks.” Laced with irony and satire, Persson’s tale takes a serious turn straight from the headlines of yore with a plot to remove a popular prime minister from the scene.
“What fucking people there are and what fucking lives they live,” reflects one grim flatfoot. Just so. Persson does a fine job of pitting one desperate soul against another in a philosophically charged tale worthy of Ingmar Bergman—but with lots more guns.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-37745-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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