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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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