His detective isn’t the most pleasant of company, but Persson’s wry commentaries on contemporary Swedish life make for...
More Scandinavian murder mayhem from Swedish novelist/criminologist Persson (The Dying Detective, 2017, etc.).
Evert Bäckström lacks the noble mien of Hercule Poirot and the rough chivalry of Philip Marlowe; he’s a worldly schlub of large appetites and strong opinions (“carrots and oatbran were almost certainly one contributing fact to why his malnourished and cretinous colleagues fucked up with such depressing regularity”) who doesn’t lack for prejudices and the ugly language to accompany them. Still, he’s been at the detective game for a long time, and even if he likes to hide out in his office with the door closed and a do-not-disturb light, he’s actually reasonably good at his job, less briskly efficient than his right-hand man (“who, naturally, was a woman”), but still game to “wield the sword of justice” come Monday morning each week. As the narrative progresses, one week’s comparatively mild body count is headed by the murder of an arty aristocrat, illustrating that he who lives by the auction catalog dies by the auction catalog. But that murder has bearing on another, this one of a lawyer with connections to organized crime and the drug trade—and, not coincidentally, to a plot to do away with Bäckström. There’s a Maltese falcon in the equation, too, in the form of a music box that has been wandering from living room to living room ever since it slipped out of the possession of “that fat bloke who was always smoking a cigar”—that is, Winston Churchill. Getting to the facts of the matter takes plenty of time, and Persson seems in no hurry to arrive at a conclusion, which, one assumes, is a reflection of the business-as-usual slow unfolding of criminal investigations, particularly ones as tangled as this, in which one bit of bad behavior leads to another.
His detective isn’t the most pleasant of company, but Persson’s wry commentaries on contemporary Swedish life make for pleasing entertainment.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87295-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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