The Hammers, who put the procedure in procedural, keep the pot simmering at such a low temperature you’ll wonder if they’ve...
The fourth of the Hammer siblings’ accounts of Danish skulduggery follows a human trafficking ring to its untidy but logical end.
Identifying the skeletal remains of a young woman killed six months ago, her body dumped in a lake in Hanehoved Forest, is obviously going to be quite a challenge for Detective Superintendent Konrad "Simon" Simonsen (The Vanished, 2016, etc.) and his colleagues in the Copenhagen Homicide Department. It will take months before their painstaking, brick-by-brick investigation reveals what the reader has known all along: the dead woman, an uncooperative Nigerian teenager who’d been smuggled into Denmark and forced into prostitution, was accidentally killed in the middle of a punishment administered by Henrik Krag, a newcomer to this kind of work, while his more experienced partner, Jan Podowski, and Benedikte Lerche-Larsen, the boss’s daughter, looked on. Simon and his crew deferentially interview Adam Blixen-Agerskjold, the chamberlain and gentleman farmer who owns the forest, and his lady, Lenette, before they develop a more serious interest in estate bailiff Frode Otto, whose four-year-old conviction for assault makes him a much more likely prospect. And indeed Otto, questioned by the police, smilingly confesses to three additional rapes on which the statute of limitations has run out. While Simon and company are running down unpromising leads, the tale keeps turning to Benedikte’s hate/hate relationship with her father, poker and prostitution king Svend Lerche, and his helpmeet, Karina Larsen—who want to keep their daughter on a short leash even as they groom her to take over the family business—and her unlikely romance with Henrik Krag, which promises to be equally dysfunctional.
The Hammers, who put the procedure in procedural, keep the pot simmering at such a low temperature you’ll wonder if they’ve mistaken the fridge for the stovetop. The stubborn lack of momentum makes this one a natural for travelers on endless flights.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-749-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
