Less notable for its individual stories than for the revised narrative they support that shows Victorian women actively...
Veteran anthologist Klinger’s fondness for shadows (In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, 2015, etc.) leads him to a bit of overreaching: none of the 17 authors showcased here toiled in Christie’s shadow, because their stories all appeared between 1850 and 1917, before Christie had published a word.
Even so, Klinger the archivist and editor has done the field an invaluable service by excavating so many stories, mostly, as his subtitle aptly puts it, “by forgotten female authors” from the supposed interregnum between Poe and Conan Doyle. True, the earliest and most obscure of his discoveries—Catherine Crowe’s “The Advocate’s Wedding Day,” Mary Fortune’s “Traces of Crime,” Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Mr. Furbush”—are so ponderous and unmysterious that they’re more likely to interest antiquarians than fans, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Squire’s Story,” though more finely wrought, offers little more mystery than its contemporaries. The plot thickens with Ellen Wood’s “Mrs. Todhetley’s Earrings,” which adds an actual, albeit transparent, mystery; Elizabeth Corbett’s “Catching a Burglar,” which sends detective Dora Bell undercover as a lady’s maid; and C.L. Pirkis’ “The Ghost of Fountain Lane,” in which sleuthing Loveday Brooke brings some ingenuity to the case of a stolen check. Ellen Glasgow raises questions about the morality of abetting a criminal’s suicide in “Point in Morals”; L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace provide a virtually unguessable cause of violent death in “The Blood-Red Cross”; a nondescript Viennese detective clears a man accused of murder in Augusta Groner’s stolid “The Case of the Registered Letter”; the ghost in M.E. Braddon’s “The Winning Sequence” hides a shameful secret; the disappearance of a valuable formula in Anna Katherine Green’s “Missing: Page Thirteen,” holds the key to a long-unsuspected crime. The best stories, though, are by the least-forgotten names in the genre. The detective known as The Old Man in the Corner shines in Baroness Orczy’s “The Regent’s Park Murder”; Carolyn Wells sends up the genre amusingly in “The Adventure of the Clothes-Line”; and Susan Glaspell’s frequently reprinted “Jury of Her Peers” brings the volume to an appropriately grim yet triumphant close.
Less notable for its individual stories than for the revised narrative they support that shows Victorian women actively working the field long before Miss Marple.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-630-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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