Although McCallin (The Man from Berlin, 2013) thoughtfully provides a cast list, navigating this convoluted wartime mystery...
A German officer pursues the deaths of comrades in arms during the fall of Sarajevo in 1945.
Capt. Gregor Reinhardt has seen service in both the Great War and World War II. Now, he’s being transferred to the elite Feldjaegerkorps, which accepts only decorated soldiers. With his two Iron Crosses, Reinhardt is more than eligible. What makes him less so is his secret membership in a resistance cell, though his hopes of being effective are diminishing daily. En route to a posting in Sarajevo and on the trail of rumored deserters, Reinhardt and his subordinates find three burned bodies of Feldjaeger soldiers and about a dozen massacred civilians. When five more bodies with faces mutilated beyond recognition surface at a military construction site in Sarajevo, Reinhardt, who was a member of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei between the wars, is increasingly convinced that he’s looking at a coverup. Drawn into internecine wars of the Yugoslavian Partisans and the Ustaše (a powerful band of terrorists with whom the Nazis have an uneasy alliance), knowing that Nazi forces are planning to abandon the city, realizing that he’s been a pawn all his military life but determined to follow the investigation to its end, Reinhardt finds a clue in the missing soldbuchs, or soldier’s pay books, that points to corruption. At the center are the Ustaše headquarters in the Pale House and a Nazi penal unit with a growing number of foreign volunteers. Reinhardt’s ties to Suzana Vukíc, whom he knows from a previous case, lead him to a shadowy figure at the heart of Sarajevo’s resistance and to betrayal from all sides. As the city crumbles around him, he has one last chance to follow his own moral compass as he risks his life in a multilayered tale of war, political upheaval and fragile hope.
Although McCallin (The Man from Berlin, 2013) thoughtfully provides a cast list, navigating this convoluted wartime mystery is no easy task. The hero and his personal and professional conflicts, however, are well worth the effort.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-425-26306-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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