All three tales offer a dash of detection, but their strong suit is hometown charm.
Veteran Maine crime writers Meier, Hollis, and Ross (Yule Log Murder, 2018, etc.) team up once more for a trio of holiday-themed treats.
Haunted houses, a holiday staple, are an especially good fit for the authors’ folksy Down East setting. When the decrepit house at 66 School St. in Meier’s “Haunted House Murder” is purchased by a young couple, the good citizens of Tinker’s Cove have high hopes for its renovation—at least until the spooky lights and eerie noises emanating from the tower of the home make the local residents fear for the safety of their new neighbors. In “Death by Haunted House,” Hollis ups the ante. Not only does the couple that buys the creaky old place next door to Hayley and Danny Powell look and act peculiar, but Wendi Jo Willis, the real estate agent who sold them the house, disappears shortly after closing the sale. And in "Hallowed Out," Ross casts her net wide, offering a whole bundle of haunted houses for the price of one. To draw off-season tourists to Busman’s Harbor, Harley Prendergast, owner of the Lobsterman’s Wharf Motel, starts up a haunted house trolley tour. Some of his ghosts are questionable at best. But in the venue offering the best-documented of the local legends—the shooting of bootlegger Ned Calhoun—Prendergast’s guests get to witness a real-life shooting that leaves Spencer Jones, the actor who portrays Calhoun, undeniably dead.
All three tales offer a dash of detection, but their strong suit is hometown charm.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1996-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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